


Don't Think Twice, It's Alright

by Safiyabat



Series: Disintegration [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M, Homophobic Language, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, M/M, Mentions of child sexual abuse, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-06
Updated: 2014-01-07
Packaged: 2018-01-07 17:02:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 8
Words: 63,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1122316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Safiyabat/pseuds/Safiyabat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam is settling in at Stanford and exploring aspects of his life he'd never been free to recognize before.  John is getting to know his new family and Dean feels that he has something to prove.  Two cases will show them once again that the entire North American continent isn't really enough to keep them apart however hard they try, and shared blood isn't really enough to bring them together however much some of them might want things to be different.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Ain't No Use In Calling Out My Name, Girl

*Sam* </p>

<p></p>

<p>Sam woke. He woke because he was hot. For a moment he thought he was dreaming again, back in the stuffy, sulfurous place he’d identified as Hell for years but a moment’s examination told him that he was in fact awake. He was awake and he was not alone. This wasn’t exactly unusual these days. What was unusual – and possibly contrary to the laws of physics – was the fact that somehow he’d gotten not one but two additional people into his narrow dorm bed. He lay on his side, facing the door. Ginny was pressed into him, her back flush against his chest and his arm around her waist. He was pretty sure that his arm was the only thing keeping her in the bed. Behind him, crushed between his own back and the cinderblock wall, was Brady. </p>

 

<p>He blinked. He’d almost thought that had been a dream. Why he should think that was a little beyond him of course. When had he ever just had a normal dirty dream? (Did normal people have dirty dreams involving threesomes with their friends?) The whole thing had been Ginny’s idea, or at least Ginny had initiated it. How long had Sam been at Stanford – five weeks? Six? Pretty much every new sexual experience had been initiated in some way by Ginny. So far she hadn’t suggested anything he hadn’t enjoyed, and this was no different. 

It had been… well, it had been enlightening. That was what college was supposed to be all about, right? Enlightenment? If he’d been back with Dad – well, he’d never have experienced voluntary sex in the first place, not with a woman or a man. Not unless it somehow suited Dad’s purposes, anyway. He’d had to carefully conceal any and all attraction that he’d felt. Now, though, he was free. His sexuality was only important to himself and his partner (or partners, apparently). Now if only he knew exactly what that was…

That assumed he even wanted to give it a definition. Right now he was less concerned with labeling himself than with reducing his body temperature. Last night had been very nice and very hot. Now it was just… hot. Seriously, he felt like he was in a malfunctioning sauna. The only problem was Ginny’s frankly precarious balance. If he was going to get some relief somehow he was going to have to do this very carefully. He moved slowly, carefully disentangling himself from the pile of limbs and gently moving her into his spot on the bed so she didn’t fall. 

It worked. Both of his partners looked significantly more comfortable when he finally landed on the floor too, so it was a general win. He stretched and pulled some pajama bottoms on before tidying up the flung clothes of the other participants. Flinging the clothes off in the heat of the moment was fun. In the harsh light of the morning, though, it just felt uncontrolled and repulsive. It reminded him of the secret compartment of the Impala, honestly. So he folded up the clothes into neat little piles that he left on top of the bureau before grabbing a bottle of water and checking his messages. 

School emails weren’t terribly intense today. Of course, he wasn’t expecting much – it was Sunday, after all. There were a couple of automatic messages from lists he’d subscribed to - Mythology Weekly, Theology Journal, Constitutional Law Review, but that was really it. He had a few inquiries about translations, too – he needed to get some bills out today. There were a couple of emails about Halloween parties that he had every intention of ignoring because Halloween was the worst thing ever. 

And then there was the Taurus account. He glared a little balefully at it. He’d set it up with absolutely no time to think about it, intending to delete it once he’d helped Pastor Jim help his family out. That was all. He wasn’t a hunter anymore. To hear his father tell it he never really had been (despite the old man’s best efforts to the contrary) and that was just fine by Sam. He was a college student, a freshman. He was into schoolwork and soccer and sex, not monsters and magic and who knew what the hell. Apparently his childhood mentor had other ideas because in the two weeks since he’d finally convinced them to torch that derelict triple-decker in Fall River the priest had sent him no less than six inquiries. 

He sighed. It was almost impossible to say no to the guy, but this was getting ridiculous. He wanted to avoid hunters not help them out. He wasn’t about to help some flannel-clad miscreant murder a peaceful gardener just because she happened to practice hoodoo and he saw no reason to violently immolate a spirit if it wasn’t hurting anyone. At the same time, maybe staying plugged into that community if only on the periphery was a good idea. Hunters gossiped, they spoke amongst themselves and they traded jobs back and forth like baseball cards. If he had a finger on the pulse he stood a better chance of knowing if Meli was on someone’s target list.

He stood a better chance of knowing if he was on someone’s target list. 

He’d read his father’s journal. He’d been very young, but he’d been precocious and he’d read it. He knew that there had been those out there who had considered him to be fair game, although he wasn’t entirely sure why. Now that no one had his back he had to keep an eye on himself. 

Of course, right now he was looking at five different messages in his in box. Two had been forwarded by Jim – new “clients,” then. He opened the first and actually recoiled at the spelling. Hunters were not, as a general rule, stupid. Hunters who were stupid didn’t stay hunters for long. They tended to become worm food pretty quickly. He’d learned the hard way that for the most part they had pretty strong ideas about the academic life, though, and apparently they figured that using a spell checker would somehow negatively impact their credibility with other hunters. Maybe they saw outward signs of literacy as an affront to their masculinity? 

Brady stirred on the bed. Wait ‘till they get a load of me, he thought in the Joker’s voice. 

None of the cases in his in box were exactly open and shut. No one went to an outsider if the answer was easy. He glanced through them and then back at his companions. Ginny rolled over and groaned. “Sam?” she asked. “What time is it?” 

He checked. “Quarter after nine.” 

She buried her head under the pillow, waking Brady. “Ugh.” She pulled her head out again. “We stink.”

“Only in the best way, of course,” Brady smirked, sitting up. “I vote showers, then breakfast.” 

Sam’s stomach gave an appreciative rumble. “Seconded,” he commented. “What do you think the odds are that Morris ate every available piece of French toast?” He got up from his desk and approached his friends. 

Ginny sat up and put her hands on his hips. “Who told you to put pants on, Winchester?”

He laughed. “I suppose you’re welcome to take them off again.” 

As it turned out it took a little while for the trio to actually leave Sam’s room and get cleaned up. There was no awkwardness about going into the showers with Brady, no change in their behavior with each other at all. Well, that was okay. Why would the situation be any different with Brady than it was with any of the women Sam slept with? The guy wouldn’t have agreed to a threesome if he wasn’t comfortable with it, and whatever television or movies might have suggested Sam had learned that for Winchesters at least sex didn’t really mean much beyond sex. Maybe it had seemed a little different at the time to Sam, but there was a lot that had seemed a little different at the time to the teen. He didn’t have time to focus on it right now.

En route to the dining hall they encountered a handful of their floormates – April and Zach and Dennis and Meli and Harris, to be specific. It was funny how everyone just kind of clumped together here, like overcooked spaghetti. If it took eight people to go get brunch no wonder Ginny’d gotten the idea for a threesome. It should have felt claustrophobic to a guy who’d grown up in the back of a car, no one to talk to but the random figments that showed up in his dreams from time to time. It should have and every once in a while it did, but for the most part he was able to relax and just enjoy it. He’d been here for six weeks and there was no one breathing down his neck about moving on. There was no rustling newspaper followed by a growled, “Get your things, boys. I found us a case.” There was no, “You’re too old to be wasting time here while people are dying, boy.”

Everyone ate and talked and laughed and socialized. Sam and Harris traded legalese barbs that soon had even the most tolerant of their companions throwing home fries at them. Brady started telling a story about a trip he took with his parents to France over the summer and some frankly idiotic scrape his older brother had gotten into, which was followed by a tale of woe about a party April and Dennis had attended the night before. Meli started quizzing Brady on a class she was the TA for. Sam was eternally grateful that he was not involved with that particular program because it sounded like Hell on earth. 

After breakfast everyone went their separate ways. Sam cleared his head with a workout, as per usual. He went for a run, he did some weights in the weight room, he even went for a swim. By the time he got back to his room he still wasn’t sure how he felt about what had happened with Brady last night, but at least he knew why he wasn’t sure. Most of the women he’d been involved with had been partners first and then become his friends. Brady was one of his closest friends on campus – second only to Meli, really. It was that, rather than the fact that he was a guy, that had made his part of their ménage last night so very different. At least, that’s what he thought. He’d never been with someone he was particularly close with before. More experiences would be the best way to be sure, of course. 

But then again, maybe Brady wasn’t on board. Maybe Brady had only gone along with Ginny because, well, Ginny. Ginny could be pretty persuasive. He’d seemed to enjoy himself pretty thoroughly last night but maybe it was just a one-time thing. Not for the first time Sam wished he had someone he could discuss this with. He had school friends but he didn’t think he knew most of them well enough to bring this up. There was Meli, but… did they have the kind of relationship where he could actually talk to her about his sex life? He felt his cheeks redden at the thought. Meli was brilliant, and she was stunning, and she was brave and she was amazing. Yeah, he didn’t think he could actually discuss his sex life with Meli. There was Pastor Jim… but somehow calling up a priest and explaining that he’d been engaging in pretty casual sex with multiple partners would exactly get him a calm hearing on the whole bisexuality thing, never mind the “why is it different with him?” question.

He glared at his computer. This was what older brothers were for, damn it. Of course, even if they had supported his decision to go to school Dean would probably have flipped out about Brady. Dean never said much about men who slept with other men, and Dad had dropped enough hints to make it clear that such people were not welcome on the battlefield. (Which was fine by Sam, since he wanted no part of any battlefield, but whatever.) And Dean had changed phone numbers just to avoid talking to him. Besides, Dean was probably not exactly the best source of information when it came to the benefits of non-casual sex and how to find more of it.

He looked at the screen again. The two referrals from Jim wouldn’t actually take all that long to look into really. There was one from some hunters up in Montana who had found weird symbols carved into a rock while on a hunt in the back country and another was from a guy whose friend had been turned into a cat by what was probably a cursed object. Jim was casting a wide net on that one, hoping to find anyone who could help the guy out before he started spraying. Two of the others were from guys he’d heard from before. One was from up in Oregon asking if he had any information about ritual emasculation and another was from a guy in wine country looking for information about possible cryptids going after horses. 

The fifth was from Dean. “I don’t suppose you know anything about the Old Shade Factory in Rehoboth, Mass?” he asked in a perfectly well-composed message that was like manna to his sore eyes. 

As a matter of fact Sam did know something about the Old Shade Factory in Rehoboth, Massachusetts. “I’ve been there,” he replied. “Everything there is residual, or at least it was when I was there. Nothing you can really do about it, unless you address the ultimate source of all the weirdness in South-Eastern Mass. And if you do I think the locals will run you off with pitchforks. They wallow in their weirdness there, man.” He glanced at his business in box and his academic to-do list. He could probably devote about two hours to research right now. The cat guy got priority, because they were probably going to have to get him fixed or something if a cure wasn’t found pretty quickly. He shot a quick message back to Jim asking precisely what type of cursed object had caused the problem and then turned to the books he kept hidden in the false bottom he’d put into his closet. He was pretty sure that he’d seen something in there about human transmutation, but maybe not. 

Two hours later his alarm went off. He’d managed to find something about turning wine into water but that was about it. On a hunch he asked if the Oregonian had noticed an increase in crop yields or in the popularity of the flute. The weird symbols from Montana would take some time but he told Jim he’d look into it when he got the chance. His duty to his origins thus fulfilled he turned his attention to his thriving translation business. He sent out bills for some of the work he’d done over the past two weeks before turning his attention to the latest project in his queue. Most of the time the work was kind of dull. He was a theology major, sure, but he’d chosen the second major because of his abiding interest in the idea of sin and absolution, not because the minutiae of rules between monasteries in twelfth century France particularly floated his boat. This, though, this was a transcript of a very early witchcraft investigation and if it had all of the information in it that Sam thought it might he should be able to get a lot more out of it than the twenty bucks an hour he usually charged. So far Sam was having trouble putting it down. The material could be difficult to read, but that was kind of par for the course with a lot of heresy or witchcraft investigations. He’d definitely be retaining a copy of this one for his records. He only meant to work on this for two hours. He wound up immersed for four before an incoming message from Dean startled him out of his fascinated wonder. “You have no idea,” the older Winchester replied. “Or maybe you do, since you’ve been here. A couple of people claim that they got burned by the fire last week.”

He snorted and did some digging through the police records, just for kicks. “Local authorities strongly suspect arson is more of a factor than the supernatural,” he reported back. “No one’s ever been burned by the flames at the factory before – not since the real fire way back in the day, anyway. The kids making the claim may or may not have been trying to make an incendiary device and taken their own eyebrows off, because small town fun is universal and they were caught doing the exact same thing the week before behind the high school.” He stretched. He’d been sitting for a while. After a few pull-ups he straightened up the room and went for dinner.

This time he managed to sneak out and back alone, which meant he had a lot more time to devote to studying when he got back. He forgot to check the Taurus account until the small hours of the morning – probably closer to the time Dean would be getting up to go for his run. “Buzzkill,” his brother told him. The time signature told him that he’d just sent it anyway. “Better luck next time, huh?” Sam shook his head and leaned back. He could almost hear Dean’s voice in the distance. 

Stanford was great and everything and he wouldn’t trade it, not ever. He had his freedom. He had friends. He had privacy. He had people who didn’t view his touch as some kind of toxin. He had all the books he could want within easy reach and he had the promise of an amazing future ahead of him. There was still something missing at the end of the day, though and he knew exactly what it was. He didn’t regret the decision to leave, not for a moment, but he still missed his big brother. 

* John * 

John hadn’t ever expected to see Kate Milligan again, so he sure didn’t know what to expect now after what, almost thirteen years? He knew what not to expect and that was a resumption of the relationship (if it could be called that) that had landed him in the situation in which he now found himself. He got a hotel room a couple towns over – not in the kind of seedy joint that he’d usually use but someplace without stains. He settled in and called Kate after he assumed the kid would have gone to bed, it being a school night and all. (When did normal kids go to bed on school nights anyway?) “What are you going to tell him?” she asked him. 

He didn’t know, so he turned it back on her. “What do you want him to know? You know him best.”

“I… He’s a good kid, John. I don’t… I don’t think he needs…”

“You don’t think he needs to know his father hunts monsters.” That hurt. He saved a lot of people – hundreds, maybe thousands. “You think he’ll be ashamed.”

“I think he’ll be terrified to know that everything on Monster Movie Saturday is real, John. I think he’ll be terrified to know that the father he only just found out he even has is out there risking his life and might not even come home. I work the night shift, he spends a lot of his time alone and he doesn’t need to be alone with those thoughts.” 

He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Yeah. You’re right.” Was that how Dean had felt? No, Dean understood. Dean understood the need for what John did. He’d looked right up at John from the earliest days with trust and love and understanding, never with fear. He’d had faith that his hero would return. “So… what then? Traveling salesman?”

“I guess.” She blew some air out, like she’d been holding her breath. Was that disappointment or relief? “He’s excited to meet you.” 

“I’m… nervous, I guess,” he admitted. “I’m not exactly the kind of dad you can show off to your friends. Especially if he doesn’t know what I really do. But I’m excited to get to know him, you know? I want to make him proud. Make him smile.” He paused. “What does he like to do?” 

“He likes baseball,” she told him. “He likes sports, really. He likes school, loves science. He says he wants to be a doctor but I’m guessing that’s because of all the time he’s spent at work with me.”

“Huh. Okay. I hope he doesn’t expect help with his homework, because I never really did much with school. I can teach him how to rebuild an engine though.”

“You still driving that Impala?”

“I’ve still got her. I brought a truck this time though. The Impala’s in the shop right now.” 

She cleared her throat. “Listen, I’ve got to go but you’ll meet us at the house after school, right? He’s absolutely giddy with anticipation.” 

“Me too, Kate.” They hung up. Giddy had perhaps been the wrong word. This new son would never know the good that John had done, he’d only ever see him as a down-at-the heels travelling salesman who had blown through town however long ago and gone away again. John would never have a chance to be his hero. He’d never have a chance to teach the boy to shoot, or to run or to fight or to hide. 

At the same time, he wouldn’t have to. This son had lived in the same place for twelve years. His name wasn’t Winchester and no one was after him. Whatever had killed Mary had been after Sam and what touched Sam, so Mary had died and John and Dean had been caught up in the maelstrom. This one… he was safe. He was clean. He was pure. He hadn’t been touched by all of the evil that the rest of them swam in every day.

Dean had turned out okay. Dean had turned out to be a damn fine soldier, really, but he shouldn’t have and John knew it. What could he have been if it weren’t for the violence, if not for the running? He’d have made a fine mechanic, for one thing. Would John still have been his hero? Sam, though – what might Sam have been like had the forces of evil and the things that hunted them not both hunted him his whole life? He couldn’t remember a time when Sam hadn’t looked at him with distrust and with fear, a time when the boy had been willing to just take John’s word for something instead of going around his back to find things out for himself. Would Sam, if Mary had lived, have loved John too? Would he have stayed with the family like he should have?

Or would John managed to have been proud of the boy who had managed to get a full scholarship to a top tier school with no support from any of the people who should have backed him, like he should have? 

But this one, this new son… he didn’t have any of that baggage. He was free from all of that evil and misery. No one even knew about him. He was safe. The boy was safe and his mother was safe. With Sam and by extension with Dean, keeping them safe had meant running and training and becoming a drill sergeant instead of a father. But with this boy, safety didn’t need to mean that. Safety probably meant concealment instead. With Dean and Sam, demons knew about them before he’d found the blood on Sammy’s pillow. With the new boy, even John hadn’t known about him until three days ago. He could keep them safest if no one knew about them at all – especially Sam. 

Not, of course, that Sam was responsible for what the demon had done to his mother. The kid had been six months old. He’d been responsible for eating and pooping, and not even really responsible for that. But something had been after the boy ever since that night, and that something seemed to think the boy was “special.” John could see nothing special in the boy except his hard-headedness, of course. But maybe… maybe the boy was compromised somehow. Maybe the boy’s attitude toward him wasn’t just because the boy himself was too stubborn to see reality (or because he himself had never really warmed up to the kid, or because he just couldn’t tolerate the kid’s free-thinking in comparison with Dean’s willingness to accept orders…) It was possible that the kid was passing information to the enemy without even knowing it. He couldn’t take that risk, not with two innocent lives at stake. It wasn’t like this kid had asked to have a demon hunter for his father. 

He met the boy the next day, showing up to the house dressed in his best shabby suit and tie. He brought flowers for Kate, picked up from the sale rack at the local grocery store, and a pile of baseball playoff magazines for the boy. Kate answered the door. She didn’t really look all that different – not that John really remembered her all that well, in between the haze of the pain medication he’d been on when they’d met and the adrenaline high of a nasty ghoul hunt just completed. The boy stepped forward – a little diffident, maybe, but shining blue eyes and a smile nonetheless. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Adam Milligan.” He held out a hand. 

“John Winchester.” He gave the boy his biggest smile, or the biggest smile he could through the tears, and then he did what he couldn’t remember ever having done with either of Mary’s sons. He threw his arms around him and hugged him. 

Adam reminded him mostly of Dean at twelve. He was tall for his age, with blond hair and features that reminded the hunter so much of his dead wife that he felt almost ill. His clothes weren’t designer but they were neat and clean and probably new, not third-hand and patched fifty times. He had a great smile – a ready smile. His grades were excellent, mostly As with a few Bs thrown in for variety. Would Dean have gotten grades like this in other circumstances? He was on the football team now and looked forward to basketball when cold weather came, but his truest love was baseball and he couldn’t wait for the season to start up again. He had no doubt that he’d make the school team. He was on the chess team too.

They went to dinner at a chain restaurant and John couldn’t get over how incredibly normal this whole scene was. He pinched himself under the table. Nineteen years ago this had been his life – dinner out with the wife and son for a special occasion, father beaming with pride, son overflowing with words. Now everything seemed too bright, too clean. Nothing seemed real and everything reminded him that monsters lurked behind every corner. The waitress had to be another ghoul – that was what had brought him to town, wasn’t it? The busboy might be a demon tracking him, looking for Sam. He had to get up and go to the bathroom, splash cold water on his face and fight down the nausea.

Later that night, after the family returned to their home and John returned to his hotel room, he picked up the phone. “Hey, Jim,” he greeted. “How are you?”

“I’m not doing too badly, John. How are things on your end? I hear you left Dean kind of suddenly.” 

Dean. Right. He should give Dean something to do to keep busy. “Dean will be fine, Jim. He’s an adult and a damn fine hunter. I was wondering if you felt like talking about your buddy Taurus.” 

The priest hesitated only a moment before responding. “There isn’t really a whole lot to tell, John. He’s been doing research for me for a little while. I’ve been encouraging him to do some things on his own, I suppose.”

“Like hunt witches? Did you ever get any proof that he killed that witch, Jim?” 

“His word is good enough for me, John.” There had been a moment’s hesitation there, barely enough to count for anything but with John’s paranoia the way it was right now he couldn’t really help but pick up on it. “It’s his business.”

“He’s on the west coast, isn’t he?”

“So? The man’s been doing this for twenty years, John. He doesn’t need backup from John Winchester.” 

“How do I know I can trust him so close to Sam?”

His friend laughed out loud. “I don’t think you really have the right to trust anyone near Sam or not anymore, John. You kicked him out. Cut him loose. He’s not your problem anymore.”

“Jim, it doesn’t work like that.” “Having second thoughts about that whole disowning thing?” His words were mocking but his tone was gentle. 

“No. I’m the father and I have to stick by my words. How else am I supposed to have any authority with Dean? Or with Sam, for that matter? If I go back on my orders now – “ He cut himself off. He didn’t need to explain himself to a man who would never have children of his own. “The problem is, Jim, that as long as that demon is out there Sam will always be my problem.” 

“Well, regardless. Leave Taurus alone. You don’t need to protect Sam from the guy.” 

“Who says I’m protecting Sam?” 

The priest was silent for a while. “Go sleep it off, John.”

“I’m perfectly sober, Jim. There’s things about the boy that you don’t know, things even he doesn’t know –“

“That boy is about as good a soul as it gets, John Winchester. You’ve obviously got a bee in your bonnet about something tonight and I’m not going to waste my time arguing with you, but I’m going to tell you this – the only thing that boy needs to be protected from right now is you. Give me a call when you’re thinking clearly.” 

John hung up the handset and glared at the phone. Then he went downstairs to the hotel’s business center, resolving to purchase a laptop before leaving town.

*Dean * 

Dean lay on his back on the couch. When Dad had left he hadn’t given him much indication of how long he’d be gone. On the one hand having an actual bed to sleep on would be nice because you know, beds were more comfortable than couches. On the other hand, the bed was Dad’s. Dean had no idea where Dad had gone or how long he’d be there. If Dean moved into the bedroom he’d most likely come home that day, probably while Dean was sleeping and almost certainly while he was in the middle of a dream that he would not care to explain to his old man. So he stayed on the couch.

He needed cash so he went out to make some. He went to the casinos again, the ones in Connecticut and in Rhode Island. That was what he liked about southern New England, everything was so close together. Folks in Massachusetts didn’t want gambling in their backyards, or booze sold on Sundays? Fine, let me make a ten minute drive and there we go. Once he’d replenished his cash reserves he did a little hunting – not a lot, just some stuff to kill some time because it wasn’t like Dad was going to leave him for long. Not that Dad hadn’t left him with Sammy for months at a time but that was different. Someone had to stay with the kid and keep him out of trouble, keep him from burning the building down trying to make soup and make sure he ate and make sure he slept and wake him up when he had nightmares because god did the kid have nightmares, had them all the damn time. Someone had to keep Sammy on his training schedule too or else the kid would just hole up in his books for days and forget that any of them were there at all. So yeah – Dad hadn’t wanted to leave him behind, but someone had needed to stay behind and look after Sammy. That wasn’t an issue anymore though, so Dad would be home soon because Dad didn’t need to leave him anymore. He tackled a salt and burn – basic stuff, really. A lonely ghost that had fallen into a well a zillion years ago or something and of course in the Bridgewater Triangle the dead just couldn’t stay dead. He celebrated with a pool hustle in East Providence that came close to a very stereotypical ending for him, and how was he supposed to know that things still ran that way around there? Good thing he was still fast on his feet. He tackled a black dog up in Scituate, which he admitted later was probably not the best idea. Black dogs were usually two-man operations. He was young, though, and he was fast, and he was resourceful and a black dog was still a problem even if he didn’t have backup. He took it down too, although it chewed him up pretty good and he needed to go to the ER for some help after that one. He got the joy of staying overnight in scenic South Shore Hospital for his troubles, which he supposed could have been a lot worse. The nurses were funny if not overly hot. 

He went back to the apartment in Fall River the next day and settled back into the couch. The silence in the place was deafening. Okay, it wasn’t really silence. The people in the apartments on all sides of him were having a good old time doing their thing, whatever that “thing” might be. Right now it sounded like watching the Patriots. He flipped the TV on and had the game on himself but honestly it wasn’t the same. If Dad had been here they could have drunk beers and cleaned the guns and kept the game on for background noise while they talked about some of the cases in the area, and maybe Dad would have changed his dressings for him (maybe not) while he rested his sore muscles. If Sammy had been here he would have gone out and gotten him some good greasy burgers and he’d have argued with every call the refs made on general principles, like the refs were some kind of stand-in for Dad or something. (Because if Sammy had been here there was no way he and Dad could have been in the same room together for more than three seconds without shouting or worse.) Alone, the game just couldn’t hold his attention. Trying to focus made his whole body itch so he turned it off and grabbed the laptop. He bummed around looking at local news. Then he fired off an email to that Taurus guy. He might be on the west coast now but he knew the area, he’d been local, right? He might know something about the local hauntings. Maybe it was stupid to reach out to the guy but what else was he going to do? Sammy was gone, off limits entirely. Dad – well, Dad wouldn’t want to hear from him if he was working a case, he wouldn’t want the distraction. “I don’t suppose you know anything about the Old Shade Factory in Rehoboth, Mass?” he typed and sent. Maybe the guy wouldn’t want to hear from him. Taurus hadn’t reached out to him since the triple-decker case, since the witch. They weren’t friends, obviously. But it was something, Dean thought. He did some more online research, poking around into local hunt possibilities. He really thought the Old Shade Factory might have something to it, since someone had actually been harmed there, but who knew? He wanted to have a good queue of things to go after, both by himself for as long as Dad was gone and together whenever Dad got back. 

There was one place that kept coming up in all of the anecdotes and personal testimonials and “suPer Spo0keE New EngLanD” sites, and that was Freetown State Forest. It was huge. It contained at least three burying grounds. It was also rumored to be one of the most haunted sites in New England, and that was saying a lot. He poked around some more. Some people thought that the hauntings were the result of gangs from Providence and New Bedford and Fall River and Boston using the forest as a dumping ground and a slaughterhouse, and to be honest there might be something to it. Some of the sites he saw suggested that there might be more, and if rumors about the Bridgewater Triangle were true – and he had no reason to believe that they weren’t – then he had to accept that there was reason to believe that there could be more here. Some of them were just insane. There were tales of a phantom trucker on Copicut Road, and what was up with that? A phantom trucker? There was the Assonet Ledge, that evidently just overcame people with the urge to jump. That spawned all kinds of ghost stories of its own. There were spectral hitchhikers and residual native people wandering around the still-very-active reservation – the place was evidently just an absolute hotbed of the paranormal. 

After a few hours he checked his messages again. Taurus had replied to him. “I’ve been there,” he replied. “Everything there is residual, or at least it was when I was there. Nothing you can really do about it, unless you address the ultimate source of all the weirdness in South-Eastern Mass. And if you do I think the locals will run you off with pitchforks. They wallow in their weirdness there, man.” 

Dean blinked. The guy’s tone was so familiar, like they’d known each other for decades. He was a stranger, though. They weren’t friends. He hadn’t even checked in with him in close to two weeks. He was about to reply when he got distracted by a phone call – Brandi. Crap. He was pretty beat up – how was he going to explain that to her? “Hey, babe,” he greeted. “How’s things?”

“Not too bad,” she told him. “Figured I’d see if you wanted to hit the Olive Garden and grab dinner. I’ve got a tour group to run but I wouldn’t mind seeing you before work tonight.”

Perfect! If she was leading tourists around Haunted Fall River or whatever she wasn’t going to be pestering him about giant holes in his side. Plus, going out meant that he didn’t need to sit inside the empty apartment by himself. He dressed himself and got himself presentable and it was just a few minutes before he was out in front of the delectable Brandi’s apartment. She was dressed for work, of course, which meant really piling on the gothic chic. The hunter didn’t mind, although he’d have groused a little if Sammy’d been there. She looked good and she didn’t really go overboard like some girls did – it wasn’t like he was afraid of going home looking like he’d gotten into a dustup with a mime or anything. (Not that it would matter anymore; Sammy’s coulrophobia no longer needed to guide his decisions.) She gave him a kiss on his cheek and frowned at the bruising. “What happened to you?” She buckled her seatbelt.

“Bar fight got away from me,” he admitted. “Some of those guys were real dogs. I came out on top of course, but I still needed a stitch or two.” 

She winced. “Be careful. That’s some awfully nice packaging; I hate to think about it getting all marked up.” She winked a blue eye at him. They drove to the nearest Olive Garden and settled in. She told him about a family that had come along on the last tour she’d given. They’d brought along their seven year old daughter and she’d really thought the kid was a little young for some of the subject matter she discussed but they’d insisted. Well, the kid had kept up fine, hadn’t held the rest of the tour group up at all. The mother, on the other hand, jumped at every shadow and the whole family needed to leave the tour when she’d scared herself into passing out in front of one of the “haunted” old mills. She’d absolutely sworn that she’d seen the Grim Reaper himself looking out of the window, writing on the glass with his finger. Wherever he wrote he left a trail of ice behind him, she’d said. 

Dean shook his head at that and chuckled, and made a mental note to check the place out. “Hey, do you know anything about the Freetown State Forest?” 

She put down her water. “Sure, I’ve heard of it. I also won’t go out there alone.” “Afraid the ghosties will eat you?” he joked. 

“Dude, no. You know I’m not afraid of that crap,” she said. “There’s been rumors of satanic cult activity over there for decades, man. They killed a girl there in 1978, and another one in 1980, and a guy in ’87. A couple of people got away from them too. There’s packs of abandoned, feral dogs. It’s just… it’s not a great idea to go there by yourself. “

“But there’s stories about it,” he prodded. 

“Oh sure. We even do tours. There’s no human pain and suffering that we won’t profit from. If you’re so curious why don’t you come with? I’m leading a tour on Tuesday. It’ll do you some good to get back to nature, get out of the city.” 

Dean laughed. “Me? A nature enthusiast? Right.” 

“You’re the one with all the questions about Freaky Freetown.” 

“All right,” he assented, although he’d never planned to say no. “I will come with. It’ll be fun to mess with you at work.” 

Tonight, though, he went back to the empty apartment after dinner. He poked around online for a while, looking more into the Freetown mess. He replied to Taurus’ comment about the locals and their celebration of their weird and macabre history. “You have no idea. Or maybe you do, since you’ve been here. A couple of people claim that they got burned by the fire last week.” He got up and changed the dressing on his wounds. Then he got himself a beer and started cleaning his guns. It was only about twenty minutes before he heard the noise that told him that he had a new message. 

“Local authorities strongly suspect arson is more of a factor than the supernatural,” Taurus reported. “No one’s ever been burned by the flames at the factory before – not since the real fire way back in the day, anyway. The kids making the claim may or may not have been trying to make an incendiary device and taken their own eyebrows off, because small town fun is universal and they were caught doing the exact same thing the week before behind the high school.” He included an image of two police reports describing the incidents. 

He poked around a little more, looking for more details on the forest or on the mill Brandi had mentioned. God this was boring. Normally this would be Sammy’s thing – and Sammy would be all over it too, reading him funny little stories preceded by a “get this” like it was the most entertainment he’d gotten all day. God how he missed Sammy. The kid would be all over the stupid forest too. Hell, he’d probably have sneaked out already to go poke it with a stick, the forest and all its ghosts and spirits and the rock that looked like Massasoit. 

He pulled out his phone and brought up Sammy’s number. It would be so easy. Dad wasn’t even here, he’d never even know. No one would even know. All he’d have to do would be to hit “send” and he’d be connected. He wouldn’t have to speak. He could just listen to Sammy say, “Hello?” over and over in an increasingly annoyed tone until he hung up and that would be enough. Then his brother would hang up and let it go to voice mail and Dean could call the voice mail and just hear the recording. It would be lame – something along the lines of “Hi, this is Sam Winchester, I can’t come to the phone and blah blah blah” but it would be Sammy and he could listen to it over and over again and pretend things were okay for a night. He could do it. 

It was the area code that stopped him, that 650 in front of the number. Sammy had walked away. He had abandoned them. He’d walked away from the mission, walked away from Dad. The family business didn’t matter to Sammy anymore. The family didn’t matter to Sammy anymore, probably never had. Mom had never mattered to Sammy, even though she’d carried him under her heart for nine months and lugged him around the house for six months. Even though she’d given her life to save his. Dad didn’t matter to Sammy either, even though he’d taught them to keep themselves safe and trained them to be heroes.

Dean didn’t matter to Sammy anymore, and he needed to accept the fact the probably never had. If he’d ever mattered to Sammy he wouldn’t have left. He put the phone away and went to grab a bottle.

Several hours later the sun was threatening to come up and Dean was getting ready to fall down. He remembered that he hadn’t replied to Taurus yet. “Buzzkill,” he typed. “Better luck next time, huh?”


	2. Like You Never Did Before

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Seemingly distant events draw Sam in. John finds a case that provides a convenient excuse. Dean goes exploring in one of America's most notorious paranormal hotspots.

*Sam *

 

Sam’s life was about as full as he could possibly make it but that was okay. He got through it with a strong sense of self-discipline and chronic insomnia. He kept the different parts of his life – or rather, his different lives – in different buckets that he kept on different shelves and strict care ensured that they did not bleed into each other. His college friends did not know about his history as a hunter cadet or his current peripheral involvement in the world of the occult. His hunter clientele had been mostly funneled in through Pastor Jim although some had already decided to forego the middleman, but he carefully covered his tracks and made sure that none of them knew his real name or his real affiliation with the university. His family – well, he was dead as far as his family was concerned, but they had no idea about what he was really doing either.  


Time management was really the key. He kept careful track of his time and when his allotted time for a given problem ran out he moved on to the next thing on his list. The best part about it was that he got to decide everything. He set up his schedule. There was absolutely no one to say that there wasn’t time for studying Hebrew because they had to go dig up some moldy dead person. More to the point there was no one bursting in on him in the middle of writing a paper on constitutional law to tell him, “You have five minutes to grab your things,” and then dragging him off somewhere, never to see the inside of that room again (and never telling him where he was going, or why they were moving.) He knew where he needed to be and he arranged things so that he was there. If he found something too interesting to stop doing he lost sleep and that was okay. No one could force him to do anything.  


He knew what his days would entail. For some folks that would be their vision of Hell and those people probably made fantastic hunters, but if Sam died right now and went to Heaven he’d probably not notice the difference. (Except he’d have Dean there to share it.) On Monday he woke up and checked his email. Then he went for a run. This was followed by a shower and breakfast – coffee and yogurt, possibly some fruit. He might be joined at breakfast by friends and he might not; the Monday after getting Dean’s email about the Old Shade Factory involved both fruit and friends, although only Meli and Harris had class this early. He and Harris made their way to Constitutional Law together, where they sat through a guest lecture on the subject of the second amendment that put Sam in mind of the hidden box in his closet. After class he and Harris retreated to one of the workspaces in the lobby to hash out the details of a paired project they’d agreed to do together, arguing opposing sides of an assigned issue. Then they got coffees from the cart in the lobby before making their way to Principles of Law, the weeder course all pre-law majors were required to take. It wasn’t terribly exciting but it wasn’t exactly challenging and he could check his messages in the crowded lecture hall.  


“Do you know anything about Freetown State Forest?” Dean wanted to know.  


He rolled his eyes. This was something he’d have to deal with later. He wasn’t getting into hunter stuff in the middle of class, that was way too obvious. Plus, that was stuff Harris didn’t need to even know about.  


After Law he had an hour for lunch, and he always got a salad for lunch. He paused by the burger station and sometimes he even got a burger, not that he ever ate it. He’d get the burger and sit there and stare at it, thinking of the brother who he wished were eating it, but not today. Today he limited himself to his salad and focused on actually responding to his brother. “Yeah. I know a bit. I’ve been there a time or two. Most of the rumors have some truth to them if that’s what you’re asking but I know at least two of the ghosts were put down a few years back. Your dad has been there too, he could tell you.” He tucked into his salad.  


The response came within ten minutes. “Dad’s off on a case of his own right now, I’m just looking to kill a little time until he gets back.”  


Sam felt cold. John had seriously ditched Dean? He’d figured with him gone John wouldn’t need Dean to play prison guard anymore, he could bring his perfect little soldier around at a moment’s notice and not have to worry about the ball and chain holding them back. “I’m sorry, man. Look, there isn’t a lot in Freetown that should be handled alone. I’m happy to do some research for you, but tell me exactly what you’re looking at. The place is huge and there’s a whole lot going on. Don’t go getting yourself killed.” He glanced at the clock. There was a lot more that he wanted to say. He wanted to add things like, “Please be safe, Dean.” He wanted to say, “Screw Freetown and screw Dad. Come to California, I’m sure you can find things to kill here and at least you’ll have someone to look after you.” But Dean didn’t know who he was dealing with and wouldn’t welcome things like that from Sam even if he knew.  


He closed his laptop and went to wait out his frustrations in his chemistry lecture. Chem wasn’t his strongest subject but he knew he needed it so he brought as much focus as possible to bear on the lecture, forcing his concerns about Dean and all of the things waiting for him in Freetown to the back of his mind. Between lecture and Hebrew class he reviewed notes.  


After class he had practice. He was tempted to check his messages but he had a schedule to keep and he was going to keep it. After practice he grabbed another shower because he could never scrub himself quite clean enough but in the land of infinite showers and unlimited hot water he could sure as hell try. Then there was dinner. Dinner included socializing for a while but he still made it back to his room by eight to start on his schoolwork.  


Unfortunately that was when his phone rang. “Pastor Jim!” he greeted, forcing a smile. He was always happy to hear from his mentor, but he knew that a phone call instead of an email couldn’t possibly mean anything good. “How are you? How’s the parish?”  


“Things here are good, Sam. Things here are always good. How’s academic life for you?”  


“It’s going well. Busy as anything but it’s the good kind of busy, you know? What’s going on?”  


“I heard from your father today, Sam.” The older man sounded troubled. “He was asking all kinds of questions about Taurus.”  


He rolled his eyes. “He’s probably upset that I didn’t wait for him to deal with that witch, or like chop off his head and save it as proof or something. Both he and Dean were really concerned about whether or not I’d actually killed him.” He leaned back in his seat. “Just imagine how he’d react if he knew who Taurus really was.”  


“Well, see, he started getting really nervous about having Taurus on the same coast as you,” the priest continued. “He wasn’t making a whole lot of sense and I wasn’t sure he was entirely sober, even though he said he was.”  


“Did he think he was protecting me from the mighty bookworm Taurus?” the teen snickered.  


“I’m not sure if he thought he was protecting you from Taurus or Taurus from you or what all was going on in that head of his, but he didn’t sound right. I hope Dean can talk some sense into him.”  


“He’s not with Dean. He ditched Dean a few days ago to go on a job, or so he said. I don’t know where John is but Dean’s still in Fall River. He’s planning to go poking at Freetown,” he pointed out. “I’m worried about him.”  


“I’m worried about both of them. Listen, Sam, just keep a look out, okay? Until I figure out what’s going on with him, I’m feeling a little nervous about what he wants from you.”  


“Yeah. Thanks, Pastor Jim. I’ve got it. I appreciate the warning.”  


“Okay. You have a good night there, Sam.”  


“You too, sir.”  


He massaged his face and grabbed some water. This he didn’t need. He picked up his phone and sent a quick text to Meli. “Loose nuke warning,” he told her. Then he grabbed his theology book and reviewed for tomorrow’s lecture.  


His RA was there in ten minutes. “’Loose nuke?’” she quoted, raising one elegant eyebrow. “What exactly is that supposed to mean?”  


“I told you how I had to create a fake identity to help my family not get themselves killed last month, right?” he reminded her. “Well, now dear old Dad has gotten all paranoid about that identity and is making – well, my last connection to the family really – very nervous. He didn’t let anything slip to Pastor Jim but Jim was worried enough to call and give me a warning.”  


Meli grabbed the neck of her shirt and clutched it tighter, like it would keep her safer against John Winchester. He’d killed her uncle, and she wasn’t exactly unfamiliar with the practices for which the man had lost his life. It wasn’t a stretch to worry that she’d be next. “Okay. Okay, we can work with this. Do you think he’ll want to come here?”  


“I don’t know. I don’t think he’ll exactly want to take me out to dinner and a ball game if he does.” His left foot started tapping, pretty much entirely of its own volition. “It’s possible that he’s just drunk and throwing things out there, you know?”  


“I’d rather not risk everything on a possibility.” She made a face. “I have an idea if you’ll back me up. I mean, you feel in fear for your life, right?”  


“Hell yeah I do.”  


“And I’m pretty sure half the women on this floor could testify to the bruises on your body when you showed up. And your teammates on that soccer team of yours, and anyone who saw you in that locker room. Am I right?” He nodded. “Okay. I need you to get me some pictures of him.”  


He glanced at the clock. This was going to interfere with his schedule, but he could make it work. “This won’t be entirely legal, although it’s technically my laptop they’re using so I guess it’s a gray area.”  
His fingers started dancing across the keyboard. Fortunately Dean was online at the moment. What he was doing was anyone’s guess – probably looking for porn, knowing him. That machine was pretty secure but Sam had set up all of the security on it himself, so he knew all of the passwords and the backdoors. Once he found the machine on the local provider’s network he was able to retrieve the files without a problem. “These are the photos we used to make fake IDs,” he told her after carefully backing out of the system. “Here he is with a beard, without a beard.” He emailed her the files. “Should be all you need.”  


“I’ll get right on my nasty evil plan.” He chuckled weakly. “Who are those?”  


“These others? Those are my brother, Dean.” He sighed.  


She smiled gently and put a hand on his shoulder. “Hm. Handsome fellow, at least.”  


Of course she thought he was handsome. She was the most beautiful woman on campus. “Yeah. He knows it, too.” He closed the files.  


“Funny. You don’t look like either of them.”  


“No. You’re right, I don’t.” He shrugged. “My dad had a theory about that, but I’m pretty sure he was drunk when he came up with it. It doesn’t matter now. I’ve just got to… you know… this.”  


She leaned her head against his shoulder for a moment. “You know, a bunch of the girls are watching ‘7th Heaven’ in the common area. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind if you joined them.”  


He looked at his books. “Thanks, but I’ve got a lot of things to do here, you know? Work for classes and work for work, and there’s a guy who got cursed and turned into a cat –“  


She laughed. “Oh my God, a cat?” He nodded. “Let me see if I can find anything out. I think my great-grandmother might have heard something about that once.”  


“Really? How badly do you have to screw up to get turned into a cat?”  


“You don’t even want to know. Go ahead, get to work. I’ll see what I can do about your daddy issue here.” Even he had to laugh about that.  


He took a few deep breaths to clear his head. Maybe, he thought, he should check his messages before he tried to focus again. His school messages were all pretty mellow – comments on the reading from the teaching assistant in Law 101, clarifications on an assignment for Theology. The Taurus account had some new messages, of course. The guy with the castrations had indeed noticed an increase in crop yields AND a marked increase in flute purchases. That narrowed down his search radius significantly. “You’re dealing with a cult devoted to Attis and Cybele. The good news is that you’ll need to take out the idol that’s representing Cybele – the idol representing Attis should disintegrate and not regenerate without her. A bronze dagger should do the trick. The only catch is that it has to be wiped with lion’s blood. A little bit should do the trick – break into the vet’s office at the zoo and get some from a blood draw or something, no need to go wrestle Simba.”  


The next message was from John Winchester. “You seem fairly versed in black magic rituals. Are you a magician?”  


Well, at least that one didn’t need a lot of research to answer. “No. I’m a scholar and a researcher. Bobby Singer probably knows more about black magic than I do and he’s certainly not a warlock.”  


The next message was from Dean. “I’m heading up to Freetown tomorrow,” he told him. “This girl I’m seeing does ‘haunted’ tours of the area. I’m just going to check it out and hear some of the local stories. I won’t get into anything too rough on my own. Took on a black dog in Scituate the other day and got tore up pretty good; I’m not looking to repeat the experience. “  


Oh God oh God oh God. A black dog was hard enough with two or three people, never mind one. Of course, maybe it was only hard with three people because one of them kept holding them back and screwing them up. “You have been doing this for a while,” he admitted. “It’s not like you don’t know what you’re doing.” He hit send. Why the hell hadn’t Dad taken Dean with him?  


He managed to get through his three hours of schoolwork now that he was calmer. Once that was taken care of he got some translating done – about an hour and a half – and then a little bit of research for the guy in Montana before he needed to call it a night.  


Tuesday was a little bit lighter in terms of courseload. He still managed to a tight schedule, though, because that allowed him to get more done than he would have otherwise. He knew it was maybe a little much, but he’d never had so much control over… well, anything before and he was going to wallow in it. He scheduled in a workout during the space between his law discussion and his two hour chem lab, both to have a workout on a non-practice day and to get his brain focused on the lab so he didn’t blow it up. Afterward he went home and did a couple hours of schoolwork – precisely scheduled – before Meli came to tell him that she’d told campus security that his estranged father had put him in fear of his life and should not be allowed anywhere near campus. The pictures he’d given her had been distributed. He got some translating done and a bit of research before someone knocked on his door.  


That someone turned out to be Brady, who leaned on the door and looked sheepishly at him. There was a sleeping bag on the ground beside him, rolled up. Sam blinked. “Brady,” he greeted. “What’s up?” Crap, the ex-hunter thought wildly. I forgot to schedule time to have a big maybe-bisexual panic. What now?  


“Jack’s girlfriend stopped by for the night,” the blond admitted, running a hand through his hair. “I figured I’d stop by and see if I could crash on your floor for the night, if you don’t mind.”  


Right. So they weren’t going to talk about it. Maybe that was normal. Maybe he was overreacting, misreading. It wasn’t like he had a lot of data to base anything off of. Brady was still his friend, one of his best friends as relationships of six weeks or so went. “Yeah, of course. Come on in. Just remember that I’ve got class at nine, so I’ve got to get up early.”  


“Thanks, Winchester. You’re the man.”  


“Don’t you forget it, Brady.” He forced a grin and shut the laptop down before getting ready for bed.  


By the time he got back from the bathroom Brady had already unrolled his sleeping bag and gotten comfortable or as comfortable as a person could really get on a dorm room floor anyway. The taller freshman turned off the light and got into bed, trying to figure out how he felt about the fact that he was alone in that bed. It had never bothered him before. He’d enjoyed having someone to share with before but when he had the bed to himself he’d certainly welcomed the privacy.  


Brady was different. He’d enjoyed their evening with Ginny. If he had to think about it – well, there really wasn’t any “have to” involved. If he thought about it he had to admit that he’d liked touching Brady as much as he’d liked touching Ginny, and that while he’d definitely noticed a difference between how their touches felt his body responded to both of them well, but it was more than that and Sam wasn’t quite sure how to describe it. He really had no frame of reference other than fiction, but he really enjoyed Brady’s company and how physical contact with him made him feel. The closest experience he could really compare this to was… well, Amy, but that was completely different. He’d known Amy for all of one day before they’d had to part ways forever whereas he and Brady had shared quite a bit of time together, all of it in ways that completely failed to involve the murder of a parent or crime scene cleanup.  


Of course, it didn’t matter. Sam might be interested in something more than friendly with Brady but Brady clearly had no interest in anything beyond friendship with him. Otherwise Brady wouldn’t be lying on the floor in his sleeping bag, curled on his side facing the door away from Sam. It wasn’t like this was the first time the guy had needed to crash with Sam, after all. He’d clearly been foolish to think that Saturday night had meant anything but a good time to anyone involved. Why would he think that sex would be anything else? He was a Winchester, even if he’d fled everything associated with the name. Relationships happened to other families.  


He closed his eyes and willed himself to sleep. When a nightmare woke him at four he was almost grateful.

 

*John *

John spent three days with his new family, or rather the family he didn’t know he’d had. They went to the movies. They went to a football game. They ate dinner together and he actually helped Adam with his homework. He barely remembered helping Dean through the early days of his homework. He couldn’t remember helping Sam with his homework at all. Presumably Dean had done it. Maybe Sam had been the one helping Dean.  


During the day, though, he couldn’t spend all of his time in idleness. Well, maybe he could. The boy was in school all day but his mother was at home. Part of John wanted to spend time with the woman, the mother of this new, golden, untainted child. She was beautiful still and they had more than a little bit of a connection. At the same time that just wouldn’t work. He couldn’t risk drawing Kate or Adam further into his life. They’d only get hurt or worse and if he stayed around them he’d give in.  


So he limited himself to the few days he’d planned to stay and he avoided Kate like plague when Adam wasn’t around. Instead he stayed in his hotel and looked for a job. Well, he had a job, sort of, didn’t he? He had that Taurus fellow. If the guy was on the up-and-up he might be a good resource, useful in helping to find whatever had killed Mary. (And how could he even think about spending time around Kate when Mary still lingered unavenged?) If he wasn’t – well, he was something John would have to take out, ultimately.  


He spent Tuesday looking for information via his shiny new laptop about the witch the guy had supposedly taken out or helped take out or whatever. The witch had supposedly been taking out college students, right? There were plenty of schools on the west coast, but the witch had been taking out scientists. Not just science majors, but “promising scientists.” That kind of language suggested someplace prestigious, the kind of place that churned out Nobel Prize winners. He’d seen how Sam scanned news sources for clues, it couldn’t be that hard. He started in California because all things weird happened in California first – look at Manson, look at Altamont. No weird deaths at USC. No weird deaths at UCLA. Nothing of interest at Berkeley. Stanford, though – at Stanford he found what he was looking for. Two microbiology students in the pre-medical program had died very suddenly of very mysterious causes. One had died in a fire for which no cause whatsoever could be found and the other had “become violently ill” while celebrating after an exam. A third student in the program had disappeared without any trace at all some two and a half weeks ago, about the time Taurus had told them he had eliminated the witch. A little more digging brought him to the department’s website, which informed him that the three students involved had been among the top fifteen in their class which was apparently very important to scholars.  


There had been a witch at the same school as Sam. Maybe it had been his roommate. Maybe it had been someone in one of his classes. Maybe it had been someone in his dorm. Maybe it had been someone he knew. Maybe it had been a friend of his. Maybe he’d been helping the witch. Maybe the witch had been helping him. Maybe he’d picked up on the activity and tried to hunt the witch himself? No, that would have been too much to hope for. The kid wouldn’t have hunted the witch. He was above that kind of thing now.  


Either way it put Taurus in the general area of Stanford. On Wednesday he got up early and started looking for cases around Stanford. He started looking for missing children in the area, which was always a good way to go. Evil liked chasing after kids for some reason, and frankly if he was going to get a lead on what had taken his Mary from him it was probably going to have something to do with children. It didn’t take long to find something a little odd – a five year old had wandered away from a kindergarten playground during recess in Atwater, which wasn’t hugely far away from Palo Alto. That had been just after Labor Day. It had happened again about a week later with a three year old in Soledad, and then again with a seven year old in Coalinga. Basically it happened about once a week, in a different town every time. There didn’t seem to be any kind of rhyme or reason to it as far as the newspaper articles indicated, only that the children were never older than seven years.  


He’d gone farther for less. On Thursday the patriarch got into his car and drove. By Saturday night he made it to Palo Alto, where he found a properly seedy motel and settled in for the night. He knew of a guy out here, Mac Leeson. John wasn’t usually overly keen on working with other hunters if he didn’t have to, but there was no way Dean was going to make it out here in time to be terribly useful to him and besides – he didn’t want the boy to know he was checking on Sam. Especially not if Sam was going to be a problem. He didn’t know what was going on and he wanted to make sure he at least talked with someone local before heading in guns blazing.  


Fortunately Mac wasn’t busy right now. He was willing to meet up tomorrow night, so John was able to rest easy knowing that he had a plan in place. He sent Dean a text. “Caught another job. Go ahead and work some of the smaller cases locally until you hear from me.” Maybe it was wrong to keep the boy hanging on, but he couldn’t have Dean interfering in this one. Besides, it would do the boy good to build up some more independence. He’d made a good soldier out of him, but John wouldn’t be around forever. Dean needed some more confidence if he was going to carry on this fight without him.  


The next day he rose relatively early and made his way out to the Stanford campus. He drove up to the main entrance and pulled up to the guard booth. It was kind of a token booth – no real security provided, the guy sitting in there was reading a book for crying out loud – but it was a place to start. “Excuse me,” John said to the young man, “I’m looking for my son. He’s a freshman here and I’d like to surprise him with a visit.”  


The kid looked up at him with bored brown eyes. The eyes looked a lot less bored when they saw his face, though. “You’re John Winchester,” he observed.  


Shit, John thought to himself. “Why would you know that?” He let one hand fall to the gun in the pocket of his jacket.  


“You’re not supposed to be on campus. You need to leave right away.” He picked up the phone next to his computer, not moving his eyes from John’s face. “Yes, sir. This is the front gate. I’ve got that estranged parent we got the memo about at the front gate, requesting backup.”  


Backup? Backup? “Look, buddy, I’m just a dad who wants to see his son. There’s no need to call security about that. It’s perfectly normal, I’m pretty sure parents visit their children all the time.”  


“Not under circumstances like this. Campus police are on their way, sir. They’ll explain everything to you, I’m sure it will all be just a big misunderstanding but I honestly don’t have any more information to give you. We all just got a memo saying not to allow you onto campus or into any buildings and to call campus police if you were seen.” The kid gave him a weak smile and looked up at him. “I’m sure officers will explain everything in just a few minutes. If you want to just sit tight and hang out for a minute we’ve got a pretty quick response time here.” A siren wailed in the distance. “There we go.”  


A squad car pulled up within two minutes. A lot of campuses John had visited through the course of his work either had rent-a-cops or some kind of special campus police which was what he expected here. No, this looked like regular county deputies who happened to be stationed at Stanford. Well, that was going to make things less simple. “Mr. Winchester,” the deputy greeted. This wasn’t some young kid fresh out of the academy either. He was probably about five to ten years younger than John and had clearly not been doing desk work for most of it. “I’m Deputy Doncaster, how are you today?”  


“I’d be a lot better if I could see my son,” he said, trying to contain his temper. “What seems to be the problem?”  


“Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, sir, but it seems like your son is unwilling to see you. He’s asked the university to bar you from campus.”  


John blinked as his limbs went numb. “Excuse me?”  


“According to the statement on file I believe that there was some sort of altercation before he came to school?”  


“We got into it a bit,” John admitted.  


“Sam’s statement says that he is in fear for his life.”  


“In fear for his –“ John forced a chuckle. “That’s ridiculous. I’ll admit that we didn’t part on the best terms but he’s my son. I’m his father and I love him.” He could feel the fury rising in his chest but he contained it. The deputy only had Sam’s word to go on after all.  


“His RA and several other people on his floor all commented on the black eye and apparent cracked ribs when he arrived on campus, Mr. Winchester. So did his teammates and at least one of his professors. I understand that there are two sides to every story, but your son is over eighteen and according to our records you’re not financially involved with his education.”  


“Well, no –“  


“Then he isn’t legally under any obligation to admit you. And the university has a legal obligation to honor his wishes. Now, obviously it’s easiest for him and everyone involved if you just walk away and find some alternate way of letting him know you’d like to patch things up with him – you know, another relative or a family friend who can pass a message along when the time is right. But you can fight this if you want.”  


“I want. How do I do that?” John returned hotly.  


Doncaster raised a gray eyebrow. “Well, you can follow me down to the station, where I’ll give you a copy of the university’s documents barring you from campus to give to your lawyers.”  


“My lawyers?”  


“Well, yeah. The university is a private organization. They can bar you from campus if they want, for any reason. You’re going to have to file a lawsuit to be allowed onto campus. In the meantime we’re going to have to strongly encourage your son to take out a formal, legal restraining order against you, which to the best of my knowledge he has not done. Of course at that point the university won’t just be defending a student, they’ll be defending their right to restrict access to their property. So I imagine they’ll fight pretty hard but you don’t look like the kind of guy to be scared off by a fight, Mr. Winchester.”  


John exhaled slowly. He would be in control of himself. “Okay. Yeah. I would like a copy of the paperwork at least. Let’s get that squared away, and I’ll talk to my lawyers and see what I can do.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe that kid.”  


He followed the cop down a winding road to a mission-style building that turned out to be the public safety building. Doncaster led him to his desk where he sat down and waited while the deputy made copies of papers. Nearly two decades of training enabled him to quickly glance at the papers on the man’s desk. There weren’t many clues there. He saw pictures of himself – recent pictures, just like the ones they used for fake IDs. He saw a scrawled name that might have been Winchester, and maybe a building name with a number next to it?  


Doncaster gave him the paperwork and followed him off-campus. Well, that was okay. He’d come back another time, sneak in the back or something. At least now he had a starting point which was all he had really come here to get. Still, he fumed silently all the way back to the motel before he picked up the phone and called Jim. “Do you have any idea what that little brat did?” he fumed when his friend picked up the phone.  


The priest sighed. “I can only assume you mean Sam.”  


“Who else would I possibly be calling that? Dean’s a good son. Sam has had me banned from campus. My pictures – the ones we use for fake IDs – have been handed out to every cop on campus. He had the gall to tell them that he was afraid for his life! From me! That I put him in fear!” He was shouting now, spittle flying from his lips.  


“John, you can’t really be surprised, can you? You beat him up, broke his bones and disowned him.” Fatigue shrouded Jim’s voice. “I can only assume that you found this out by showing up on the Stanford campus.”  


“Well, of course. I need to make sure that Taurus really did take out that witch like he said he did.”  
“He did. I told you that he did.”  


“Did you see him do it? Did anyone you know see him do it?”  


“I’m not the hunter police, John, and neither are you. No other hunter even picked up on the witch, so I’m guessing that he did. Look, why were you really on campus? Were you planning to look in on Sam?”  


“I might check in on him and make sure that everything is on the level.”  


“You mean that he hasn’t started cavorting with evil sprits and offering himself up to demons on a platter. For crying out loud, John, no wonder the kid is afraid of you.”  


“Did you know he was going to do this?”  


“No, but I can’t say I’m surprised. You’ve never left any room for doubt about your feelings toward Sam, John. Now you’re reaping what you’ve sown. Be glad you’ve still got one son who loves you, even though you apparently abandoned him in Massachusetts to go gallivanting after the other.”  


“Don’t go telling me how to raise my boys, Murphy.”  


“Then don’t go asking me, Winchester.” Jim hung up.  


John changed into his workout clothes. He was too angry to be trusted near the weapons and if he stayed indoors he’d punch through the walls. He went for a run instead. How dared Sam actually bar him from campus? How could he make a statement like he was afraid of his father? After all that his father had done for him? All of that running, all of that moving around, it hadn’t been for his sake or for Dean’s sake. It had been because of the things that were after Sam. All of that training had been so that Sam would be ready to defend himself when the time came. What kind of crap had he been selling to the people in his dorm, to the people at that school? To Pastor Jim? Sure he’d been harsh with the boy, but it wasn’t like the boy had ever even tried to please him or do what was right. It had been all silence and resentment and resistance, and John what kind of parent would John have been if he hadn’t tried to break him of that? He needed to be able to follow orders, to take his place in the army behind Dean. He needed to prove himself trustworthy and he’d never, ever managed to do that. It was the boy who’d been a constant disappointment, not John. John might not have gotten any praise from parenting magazines but he’d done the best he could, damn it, and look at how Dean had turned out. So the problem obviously wasn’t with him. The problem was with Sam.

 

*Dean *

Dean got up and went on the “haunted” hike of Freetown State Forest on Tuesday. Brandi’s work attire for this trip bore little resemblance to her work attire for most of her excursions. For one thing the high heeled lace-up patent leather boots just weren’t going to cut it out here. She wore good, well-broken-in combat boots and black fatigue-style pants. She still had the whole “super-goth” thing going on, but it was geared less toward being creepily sexy and more toward keeping bugs off her pale skin which he supposed he could respect. He looked around at his fellow hikers. Only five or six had turned out for the all day excursion and all of them looked like pretty fit, able-bodied individuals, which he supposed they’d have to be if they were going to keep up with the whole full day hike thing.  


As they walked through the woods Dean couldn’t help but think of Sammy. Sammy would have been all over this place. He’d have probably been right up at the front of the line, asking Brandi a million and one questions about every little thing they passed. Who had been buried in this cemetery? Why were there three different cemeteries on the property, instead of burying the dead in a centralized location? What had caused the explosion that created the Assonet Ledge in the first place and were there any common links between the people who were seemingly led to end their lives there? And those hazel eyes of his would never have stopped scanning his surroundings. He’d have spotted all sorts of crap in the woods, whether or not it had been relevant. He’d have gotten all hot and bothered about some endangered oriole in the trees, or found some arrowhead on the ground that got his rocks off or something. Freetown was totally Sammy’s kind of place. (Frankly, Sammy would have been a good match for Brandi even if he was a few years younger than she usually bothered with, not that Dad would have let anything happen anyway. Not that Dean was willing to give her up entirely, but it wasn’t like they were monogamous or anything. Dean Winchester wasn’t that kind of guy and frankly Brandi wasn’t that kind of girl. But he was a magnanimous brother when his father wasn’t around, and in the fantasy world he created as he trudged through the New England autumn he could easily imagine sharing with his little brother. What dad didn’t know, after all…)  


Of course Sammy wasn’t here. Sammy was a selfish bastard and had gone off to California and Dean was alone. He needed to stay focused and concentrate on where he was. Taurus had been pretty firm in his warnings about the place and from everything he was learning about the Bridgewater Triangle in general he thought maybe Taurus was right. Maybe he should be really, really judicious about what he did and did not take on around here. He was sure as hell staying away from that damn Ledge without backup, and backup that would tackle him if it came to it. Dad needed him (he did need him, right?), he didn’t need to risk being made to throw himself off some stupid cliff.  


They saw the cemeteries, all three of them. There never was a good explanation for why there had to be three instead of one; he resolved to ask Brandi later. They saw the murder sites. They walked down Copicut Road, a mixed-media masterpiece that housed the Mad Trucker. (Seriously? A phantom trucker? How insane was that?) They saw the murder sites and the little memorials that family and friends of the victims still left there, and how sad was that? He glanced at the markings that were left but he didn’t recognize them; that was more Sammy’s department. He took a few digital pictures to send to Taurus, though. They walked along a trail that supposedly had a zombie story associated with it; Dean filed that one away for later. If someone was practicing that kind of voodoo he might be able to take care of it by himself. He might not, but it was worth looking into and it might explain some of what had been happening in the area.  


They avoided the Reservation. Brandi had told him that the local Wampanoags had been reluctant to sign a contract with her company and frankly neither Brandi nor Dean really blamed them; they’d been exploited quite enough without being a spot on the tour thank you. Some of the stories Dean had seen online had involved that part of the State Forest and it was readily accessible, but it was off the tour and the party respected that.  


Dean didn’t really encounter anything supernatural on the tour but he didn’t really expect to. Paranormal phenomena didn’t usually present themselves to groups of more than two or three, or in broad daylight. When they did – well, that wasn’t something that one guy could handle alone, even if he was armed with silver and consecrated iron rounds. He did have a persistent sensation of being watched, though, and that was kind of unpleasant. He couldn’t quite get a glimpse of what was watching him but he’d been doing this for close to twenty years. He knew better than to think that just because he couldn’t see the thing it didn’t exist.  


After the tour he and Brandi went back to Fall River and got dinner. He took her back to her place and stayed the night, making sure to show his appreciation for all the walking she’d done that day. After all, it was hard work.  


The next day he went back to his place and did some more research. He was pretty set against going after the Ledge, not without Dad and maybe a whole army because that was just freaky. The Mad Trucker was interesting though. It sounded like the spiritual remains of a drunk Bostonian who couldn’t quite figure out that death meant that it was time to stop driving like a jerk. Well, he at least knew how to go about researching that. Before he went to the library though he sent a message to Taurus.  


First he summarized his trip to the forest. He asked specific questions about cases he thought might be worthwhile without being suicidal. In a lot of ways it felt like he was reporting to his dad, but he guessed he was used to having someone to report to. He attached pictures of the symbols by the murder sites and asked if his apparent ally had any input. Then he talked about the sensation of being watched.  


He went to the library after that. His target was pickup truck accidents involving single occupants and, based on the behavior of the ghost, alcohol. Stories had been showing up since the 1970s at least, so he started looking backward from there. By the time the library closed he had a bad headache and a few dozen leads. Maybe, he thought, he should have gotten a better idea of the make and model of the vehicle before going and poking at decades of DUIs. Damn it, this was supposed to have been Sammy’s job.  


He went home and got himself dinner. There was actually a message from Taurus, which was nice. It made the apartment feel less empty somehow. “I’ll check out those symbols for you, but before you go poking around check and see if there’s been any phenomena around them. Just because someone calls themselves a Satanist doesn’t mean they can actually do anything magical, you know? Your father put down one of the highway ghosts there something like four years ago. Your brother took care of another, one of the murder victims, around the same time. Your father doesn’t know.  


“As for the feeling of being watched, that’s very bad. Very, very bad. There are Things in those woods, capital justified, that do not like humans. You don’t want them to take an interest in you. Just stay out and go find someplace else to play.”  


Dean frowned. “How do you know what my brother got up to when my dad wasn’t around?” More to the point, why didn’t he? And why didn’t Dad? Sammy wouldn’t have been more than fifteen. Why would some complete stranger know more about Sammy than Dean or Dad? How was that possible? “How do you even know my brother?”  


He should really tell Dad about this. He knew Dad didn’t like other hunters around either of the brothers, but he especially didn’t like them to be around Sammy. And Sammy could make some dumb decisions, like going to California at all. But Dad was off somewhere doing his own job, something he wanted to keep Dean away from, and he wouldn’t welcome the interruption. He ate his dinner and went out to a bar, this one up in Boston to avoid attention. Once he’d scammed some cash out of some tourists and some more out of some townies he got back in his car and drove back down to Freetown.  


This was a stupid idea. He knew it was a stupid idea. He still had stitches in, and they freaking hurt. At the same time, it wasn’t like he could tell Dad he had been sitting idle while he’d been gone. That would make him as bad as Sammy. He was the good son. He had a responsibility, both to keep people safe and to make his dad proud. He had to make up for Sammy’s defection. He wasn’t going to attack; he wasn’t even planning to engage the thing. He was just going to go do some recon, and where could be the harm in that?  


Of course he saw the damn truck. He saw it because it tried to run him down. Thank God he knew how to drive his baby better than anything. Thank God the roads were dry. Thank God he wasn’t some civilian, terrified beyond measure. Thank God he was very much aware of the width of the road. Thank God he had consecrated iron rounds loaded in his Taurus, because that was what finally dissipated the apparition. It cleared the thing up long enough for him to make a getaway anyway, and that was what mattered.  


At least he’d gotten a make and model. He guessed it was probably a 1960s model pickup, Ford, light colored. It gave him something to narrow down his search, anyway. He drove back to his apartment and grabbed the whiskey, hoping that it would help to soothe away the adrenaline as he checked his email. Just as he’d hoped there was an incoming message from Taurus. “We’ve met. I mentioned that you were going to Freetown. He was a little freaked out. He was worried about you.”  


“He doesn’t get to be worried about me anymore,” he typed back. “He walked out. Do you know anything about the Mad Trucker of Copicut Road?” He sat back. That awful feeling of being watched had still been there, now that he thought about it. He’d just been too busy driving for his life to think about it much.  


“I don’t think it works like that, Dean. But yeah, I know the Mad Trucker is more obnoxious during Red Sox season. Why – are you thinking about taking him on? I might be able to narrow down the ghost’s identity for you.”  


“I thought you were super busy.”  


“I am. But I know you hate doing this stuff and it’s not like it’s hard for me to look it up remotely. Let me guess – you were out there tonight and that’s why you’re up this late but online and sober.”  


“You really have been talking to Sammy, haven’t you?”  


“Your father’s not the only Winchester with a reputation.”  


Dean chuckled. “Okay, you caught me. It was a light-colored 1960s model Ford pickup. That should help narrow down your search. I’m thinking single occupant OUI, considering how this guy is rumored to behave.”  


“Got it.” Dean grinned. Satisfied that the job would get done, he sought out the URL of his favorite skin mag and settled in for the evening.  


The next day he found a message waiting for him from Taurus that the guy must have sent at four in the morning his time. “Your victim is most likely Danny O’Rourke of North Westport,” his faceless comrade informed him. “He apparently wrapped himself around any number of trees in spectacular fashion following a Sox loss in 1967. His mortal remains can be found in plot 597 of the Lakeside Cemetery in scenic North Westport, which is conveniently screened from street view by a large mausoleum and a steep hill.”  


“Dude, did you stay up all night looking this stuff up?” he typed back, and went out for a run.  


When he got back he had a reply. “No. I just haven’t been sleeping all that well lately. Let me know how it goes.”  


Dean went out that night to salt and burn Danny O’Rourke’s remains. The good news was that no one seemed to feel compelled to go drink or otherwise rebel in the cemetery that night, so he was able to work undisturbed. Getting interrupted and having to explain to strangers that you weren’t looking to engage in anything untoward with someone’s great-grandpa was always awkward, especially when you were alone. The downside, of course, was that he was, well, alone. There was no one to keep the guy’s spirit at bay while he dealt with the nitty-gritty of the digging, which took a lot longer when the dirt got flung in his face and when he himself got tossed into tombstones. A few cracked ribs and a possible concussion later, though, he managed to send the sucker up like the marshmallow guy in that movie. Filling the hole back in took even longer – yet another way in which Sammy’s defection left him in a lurch – and he staggered back to the Impala.  


Somehow he made it back to the apartment, where he checked himself over. Some of his stitches had torn a bit but he’d healed enough that he could just slap a bandage over that spot and call it good. He might have a mild concussion but it was probably just a good bonk on the head; the ribs were sore but might be just bruised. He checked his email. “I don’t know if O’Rourke was the Mad Trucker or not,” he told Taurus, “but he sure didn’t like me messing with his bones. He’s gone now. I’ll go out tomorrow night and make sure he was our guy though.”  


He went to grab a shower. The hot water felt so incredibly good on his battered body it was almost pathetic. He should go out. He should celebrate. His head felt like it was going to pop right off. Maybe tomorrow he’d go party, he still didn’t know if the job was completely done. Right now he just wanted to relax and maybe not ache so much. He reached into his duffel and grabbed his worn copy of “Cat’s Cradle” and settled into the couch.  


The next night he went out to Copicut Road and waited to see if the Mad Trucker returned. He waited until he honestly didn’t feel he could safely wait out the sun anymore, but there was no sign of the thing. It was possible that the ghost just didn’t want another face full of consecrated iron and hot gas, but Dean didn’t believe in coincidence. He was going to call this one closed. He turned the key in the ignition.  


That was when he saw it, just for a moment, in the side mirror. The thing was small, couldn’t have been more than three feet tall. It had thick, dark hair on its body but weirdly white eyes and it just grinned at him in a way that made his skin crawl. It only appeared to him for a second and then it was gone again, but Dean didn’t wait around to see more. He drove away as fast as he could.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things that are totally a thing: the murders that I mentioned happening at Freetown are documented as happening. The thing that Dean saw in his mirror is a local legend that predates European settlement. (We'll get there, I promise.) The Mad Trucker of Copicut Road is a well-known local legend. Making him a drunken Red Sox fan was all me and says a lot more about me than anything else I've ever written.


	3. I Can't Hear You Anymore

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam gets a visitor he wanted. Sam gets a visitor he didn't want. Dean gets a visitor. Everyone has company.

*Sam * 

Sam’s week had started out so well, but by Tuesday night it had all gone straight into the crapper. Who knew that something as… as stupid as who he was or wasn’t sleeping with, or who was or wasn’t going to sleep with him, could have such an effect on him? Dean wouldn’t have let it get him down. Granted, Dean wouldn’t have gotten all hung up on a guy to begin with, but did that matter? Dean wouldn’t have gotten all hung up on a woman either. Dean wouldn’t have gotten all hung up. He knew better and frankly Sam should know better too. So he forced his mind away from it because he shouldn’t have let it think along those lines anyway. If his mood was a little less open and enthusiastic, well, he just came off a little quieter than normal. 

Fortunately the Great Maybe-Bisexual Completely Unnecessary Panic of 2002 came right on the heels of Pastor Jim’s warning about Dad. That gave him a completely plausible reason to seem a little down, something that everyone knew about. Of course, everyone knew about it because Meli had gone around and gotten them to sign something stating that they’d seen clear evidence that he’d been injured when he arrived on campus, which she’d done in the hopes of getting his father barred from campus. It was a reasonable precaution and he should have done it himself when he’d arrived, he just hadn’t thought it necessary. And maybe it wasn’t necessary. He didn’t think his father thought enough of him to want to drive clear across the country to pester him never mind kill him. Then again, there was that whole “insubordination” thing. And it was getting awfully close to November – far too close for his father to be counted upon to act with reason or sobriety. So he figured that most folks would chalk up any apparent mood changes to that, which was good. 

Then of course there was Dean, who’d apparently been ditched in Fall River and was just hanging around looking for some trouble to get into. And finding it, clearly. On the same day that Sam recognized his first unrequited crush and blocked his father from legally accessing campus for all the good that would do his brother was discovering a great big playground for all sorts of supernatural weirdness smack dab in the middle of North America’s paranormal power-up zone. The next day, while Meli was getting people to actually sign statements testifying to Sam’s physical state upon arrival at Stanford, Dean was out getting chased by the Mad Trucker of Copicut Road. And while Sam loved corresponding with Dean like this he kept having to fight the urge to reach out and shake him and say things like, “You idiot! You’ve got how many stitches from a black dog? Stay the hell home and watch Dr. Sexy reruns until the scabs fall off at least!” Of course, being treated like a friend when he was hiding behind a false identity and being told that he (as himself) wasn’t allowed to be worried for him was like a stab to the gut, and he was in a position to know. 

By Thursday he had at least a little bit of sun in his life. The Department of Public Safety had taken one look at the request and essentially said, “Oh hell no,” to the idea of John Winchester on campus. And Sam had no real reason to leave campus if he didn’t mind running indoors or on the track. He had a hard time sleeping, of course, but that just gave him more time for research and work and schoolwork. At this rate he’d be miles ahead of Harris for their Constitutional Law project, and his paper for Theology was coming along very nicely indeed. Meli also got back to him about the cat guy on Thursday; it was nice to actually find an answer for the poor fellow. The guy probably wasn’t going to like it, but hey – if he didn’t want to take a bath in a sulfur solution every day for six months he probably shouldn’t have pissed off such a powerful witch in the first place. Sam ordered a huge bouquet of roses for his RA and for the great-grandmother who had given her the information.

Dean emailed him that night to tell him he’d torched the remains; his spelling suggested a concussion. Apparently O’Rourke had put up a fight. Great. Hunting without backup was stupid. Everyone knew that. Sam knew that and he wasn’t supposed to know the first thing about hunting at all. He sent back a message encouraging his brother to please rest up and take it easy, which he knew the older Winchester would ignore. Winchesters didn’t take it easy. Winchesters did everything the hard way until it killed them. 

The flowers arrived for Meli on Friday. She was delighted with them, even though she couldn’t share exactly why. The dorm was both quiet and loud. Most people were out at parties; Sam just wasn’t in the mood. He wasn’t the most party-oriented guy anyway – too many people in a confined space just made him feel paranoid. In fact, he felt so antisocial that he turned off the lights and turned down the contrast on his laptop, trying to keep the room as dark as possible so no one knew he was there. Once or twice he thought he heard someone stop by and he definitely heard at least one person stop and leave a message on the whiteboard on the door but he just wasn’t in the mood. Instead he prepped for tomorrow’s mock trial and researched those glyphs from Montana. 

Saturday he had a game and that was good – it got his mind off his crap week and into the adrenaline of the game. Afterward he worked out before his mock trial, in which he played part of the defense team. As a freshman he didn’t really get to do much but he’d helped to prepare most of the arguments and he was pretty pleased to hear his own work being incorporated into the end results. When he got home he had another message from Dean. “I went to the woods last night to make sure O’Rourke was our guy,” his brother told him, “and I thought I saw something in my side mirror. I just saw it for like half a second and maybe I was still concussed but I figured I’d run it by you just in case. Have you ever seen something that was about three feet tall and looked like an evil, skinny Ewok?”

Sam closed his eyes. That wasn’t how he’d have described them, but yeah. “Did it touch you, shoot you with anything or sprinkle any dust on you?” he asked, making sure to flag his message as high priority. He considered calling Pastor Jim and asking him to call Dean. “What you’ve seen is a pukwudgie and it is not your friend.” Of course Dean would have attracted the attention of a pukwudgie. Because it wasn’t bad enough that Dad had left him all alone in freaking Fall River to go traipsing through whatever crap show the Triangle could throw at him. 

Someone knocked on his door. He sighed and got up to answer it. “Hi, Lianne,” he greeted, plastering a false smile across his face. “How’s it going?” 

“I stopped by to ask you the same thing,” she replied. “You’ve been awfully quiet lately and I was kind of worried about you, so I stopped by to check on you and maybe keep you company if you wanted. You know, if that’s okay.”

For a moment he thought about begging off. He was anxious, he was angry, he was frankly just horrible company right now. At the same time here she was, with her hand on his arm and a gleam in her eye. “I… I’d like that,” he admitted, moving aside and letting her in. She’d brought a movie that they even watched about half of and left running in the background. She made the first move and for half a second he thought he might be too agitated to respond, but then he managed to relax a little. Maybe she wasn’t Brady, but she was someone who wanted him or at least wanted him right now. He was a Winchester and that had to be enough; the least he could do would be to make her happy, right? And he could certainly do that. 

It wasn’t entirely a surprise when Meli knocked on his door at eight on Sunday morning. It might have been an inconvenience but it wasn’t a surprise. “Sam, it’s me,” she called. “I’ve got a sheriff’s deputy with me.” 

“A cop?” Lianne asked, sitting straight up and trying to cover herself with a sheet. “Is it about your dad?”

“Give us a second,” Sam called back. “It has to be,” he replied. He passed the classics major her clothes and started pulling his own on. What exactly was Lianne involved with that had her so nervous when the cops got involved? The lady was dressed in record time. “You good?”

She gave him a look that spoke volumes about her feelings on the subject of law enforcement but nodded. “Sure.”

The room’s legal occupant opened the door. His RA hid her mouth with her hand, trying to keep from laughing. The corners of the deputy’s mouth twitched too. “Good morning, Sam, Lianne,” Meli greeted. “This is Deputy Connors. She’s from Public Safety.”

“Sam, your father arrived on campus a moment ago,” the cop informed him gently. He forced himself to calm down. It wasn’t as though this was news. Jim had warned him that he might try something stupid and hell, Sam had suspected that he just wouldn’t be allowed to walk away. “He’s saying that he just wants to see you but the school is honoring your wishes and keeping him away from you. Another deputy is on his way to the front entrance to meet him and explain the situation.”

“He’s armed,” the teen warned. “I don’t think he’s stupid to do anything to a cop in broad daylight though.” He sighed. “He will find a way to get onto campus eventually. It’s kind of what he does.” Lianne put a hand on his back and rubbed gently. It was a soothing gesture, he guessed. 

“Public safety is going to do everything in its power to keep you safe, Sam,” Connors assured him, laying a hand on his forearm and meeting his eyes. “We’re going to do our best to make sure that no harm comes to you. In cases like these we usually recommend that the target stay vigilant, of course. Keep to well-lit, populated areas. Try to avoid being isolated. Stalkers are less willing to strike if their actions are going to be noticed. Meli informs me that you shouldn’t have a problem finding company.” Everyone but Sam grinned openly and Lianne even blushed. “Do you have a specific schedule that you keep outside of class?”

Did he ever. “Yeah, sure. You want me to email it to you?” 

“That would be fantastic. I feel like I should tell you to change it up a bit so he doesn’t pick up on it to make it easier to find you, but given that you actually have to make it to your classes that becomes a little more difficult. I think making sure you’re safe doing the things you do is probably more doable.” She gave him a winning smile. 

He tried to return it. “He’d like nothing better than to disrupt my education. Thanks, Deputy.”

“Well, now that everyone’s nice and wide awake why don’t we all go grab some breakfast?” Lianne suggested brightly.

The last thing in the world that the retired hunter felt like was food but he went along with it. He didn’t want to seem ungrateful although he did encourage showering first. They picked up a few stray students and moved in an amoeba-like fashion toward the cafeteria. After breakfast they amoebaed back to the floor – Sam always conveniently in the center of the pack, like he could hide there when he was a full head taller than the rest of them – and he managed to go hide back in his room under the pretense of having work to do. Well, it wasn’t exactly a pretense. He did have work to do. It wasn’t entirely schoolwork, of course.

Dean replied to his message about the pukwudgie. “No, man. I don’t think it sprinkled anything on me or anything weird like that. I just saw it in the mirror. Why, is that bad?”

He rolled his eyes. Of course it was bad. Everything was bad, always. “You can’t take a pukwudgie on alone. I don’t know if you could take on a pukwudgie on in a group. I don’t know anyone who has, not and come out on top.” It wasn’t entirely a lie. He didn’t know anyone who’d killed a pukwudgie. “I know a few theories about how to kill them, but they can use both magic and ranged weapons. The ranged weapons are poisonous and they love to play tricks on people. Mean, nasty, evil tricks because they hate humanity, not because they like giving people just desserts or teaching people lessons or anything. Do not go back into the forest, Dean. If it let you see it, there’s something it’s got in mind for you and it is not nice.” What were the odds that Dean would listen? Probably fairly low, especially if Dad were busy hunting Sam instead of giving Dean orders. He fought the urge to bolt, get on a plane and go find his brother. “Don’t think of the pukwudgie as a challenge, Dean. I’m serious. It’s a very dangerous creature and it would take a good-sized army of hunters to take even one down.” 

He focused on translations for a few hours, until someone came to drag him off to lunch. This time there were even more people in the crowd, at least half the floor. He tried not to show how much this made him want another shower. So many people, such a press of bodies, and everyone talking around him and laughing and joking. They’d all assembled for him – or did they even know that they’d been dragged out for his sake? What if Dad had sneaked back onto campus and started taking potshots? This late in October anything was possible. “You’re supposed to eat the salad, Winchester,” Brady said into his ear, “Not shred the lettuce with two forks and hope no one notices.” The blond brushed his hand against Sam’s as he moved away, and Sam’s heart sped up. Great, he thought. As if last week wasn’t bad enough, apparently he still wasn’t over the Dumbest Crush Ever. 

After lunch he was allowed some privacy again. There was no word from Dean. He studied for a while and got up to do some calisthenics. He didn’t exactly feel like begging for an escort to the gym but he could at least move around a little in his room, right? People came to drag him to dinner after that, and this was really starting to feel like prison. 

After dinner he checked his messages. Nothing from Dean, who even now might well be in the grip of the most malevolent troll-doll-things this side of Hell. Or hooking up with a Patriots cheerleader. It could go either way. There was a message from Mac Leeson, one of his clients as Taurus. Leeson was friends with the cat guy so Sam was surprised to hear from him so soon – had there been a problem with the cure? The message didn’t complain any complaints about the efficacy of the Louisiana cure, although there was some grumbling about the stench of the baths. “I was wondering if you could help me out with some research. A hunter from out of state came along and caught wind of a case – guy by the name of John Winchester. You might have heard of him. Anyway, he showed me that a bunch of kids have gone missing – just wandered off from day-cares and schools in a bunch of different towns. Winchester’s thinking demon and I know you’re the go-to guy for magic and demons and stuff. Would you mind taking a look?” He felt cold suddenly. 

This was a trap, obviously trying to lure either Sam or Taurus or both out into the open. John Winchester didn’t even completely believe in demons. Still, he’d worked with Leeson before. “I’ll take a look and what you’ve got. Scan the materials and email them to me. Winchester will push back and try to force a face-to-face meeting. It’s not going to happen. A copy center should be able to do the scanning for you if you don’t have a scanner.” 

A response came back within half an hour, but not from Leeson. “For someone who’s never met me you’ve got an awful lot of nerve commenting on my personal habits,” John Winchester informed him from a shiny new Hotmail account.

Sam bit back on his bitterness. “You know Dean’s seen a pukwudgie right? He can’t take on one of those by himself, and if he’s seen it the thing is targeting him.” He exhaled. “If you want my help with the missing kids, get the information to me electronically. If you don’t, keep me out of it.” He turned his attention to his theology text, briefly. 

“People are dying here!”

He threw his shoe at the door. How often had he heard that over the past nineteen years? “Then you’ll get me the information as soon as you can. Or you’ll stop baiting me and hunting your son and start working on finding those kids yourself.” It wasn’t like there was proof that anyone was dying, of course. That would be a huge clue, actually. Bodies would have made the news and it wasn’t like Sam didn’t read the news. 

About an hour later someone knocked on his door. He rose and peered out to find Brady standing there. He considered ignoring him, pretending to be in the bathroom or something. He just couldn’t deal right now. Still, Brady was one of his best friends on campus, which made him one of his best friends in the world. His father had showed up armed on campus, possibly looking to kill him. Maybe pushing away people who actually wanted to talk to him wasn’t exactly the best thing in the world, even if they didn’t want the same things. He opened the door. “Hey, Brady.” 

The blond smiled, maybe a little shyly. “Mind if I come in?”

As it happened, Sam minded terribly. He moved aside. “Not at all. “What’s going on?” He reached into his mini-fridge and grabbed a couple of bottles of water, one of which he offered to his friend.

“I was going to ask you the same question.” He sat on the edge of the meticulously made bed. “You’ve been pretty quiet lately. I guess it makes sense, you know, with having to get your dad barred from campus and everything. Before Tuesday I never knew you had those kinds of problems at home, you know? I mean, you’ve never talked about your family before.” 

Sam shrugged. “Not much to say, really. Dad was really, uh, unenthusiastic about the whole college thing. I hoped disowning me was the end of it but apparently not.” He rubbed at his face. “I don’t think he’ll be willing to risk hurting anyone else though, not just to get at me.” 

“What’s his deal? I mean, my dad was pissed that I didn’t get into Harvard but…” 

Sam sighed. He couldn’t tell Brady the truth, but he had to tell him something. “Um… my mom was killed when I was a baby. Six months old. Dad kind of went off the deep end, turned into this total survivalist whackjob I guess. Kept us on the run all the time. He wanted us really isolated, you know? Like, we went to school but we weren’t allowed to stay in one place long enough to get attached to people. He had these real vigilante ideas, raised us to be soldiers. Child soldiers. By the time my brother was eight he was a better marksman than most cops.” 

His friend gave a long, low whistle. “Wow. Can’t say as that sounds really responsible. Did you learn to shoot too?” “Yeah. I was nowhere near as good as Dean.” He shrugged. “Anyway, Dad didn’t really value school. Neither of us was enrolled until first grade and he waited a year to put me into first grade in the first place, just because he didn’t think it was important. Started pushing me to drop out sophomore year, once I turned sixteen, so I could focus more on training and be less of a crap soldier.” He forced a little laugh.

“But he’d really want to kill you over it?” His friend leaned forward, taking a sip of his water. Sam tried not to watch. “That’s harsh.”

“He really had a thing about keeping me under tight control. I think he thought it would keep me – well, keep me under control. Keep me in his little army. Dean was… well, he remembered Mom and he was young, you know? He’d drunk the Kool-Aid. He bought into the whole revenge trip, the whole soldier thing. He liked it. He liked moving around from place to place, he loved not getting attached to people outside our unit. Not even a family, a unit. ‘We’re doing this for mom,’ he’d say. Of course, I never knew her.” Sam had been sitting in his desk chair, turned to face his guest. He played with the cap to his water bottle. 

“How could you? You were an infant. You probably couldn’t even see her face clearly.”

“Didn’t matter. Dad felt that I was, uh, insufficiently mournful. Anyway, he never actually trusted me. Spent a lot of time trying to ‘fix’ me and he really, really didn’t want any outside influences. I usually wasn’t allowed to do after-school activities, not that it mattered because I wasn’t going to be around long enough to participate and would only have let people down, you know? I got to be in a couple of plays though, when Dad would take off for a while.”

“What about sports?”

“No. If I had the energy to run around for some dumb school team I had the energy to train harder for The Mission. Whatever that was.” He snorted. “I wasn’t trusted enough to be told anything, I had to sneak around to find out anything. Like seriously – he wouldn’t even tell me if we were moving the next day. He’d just wake me up at like three in the morning and make me grab my stuff and we’d be gone.”

“What about girlfriends and stuff? How did you deal with that?” 

“Yeah, that was really high on the forbidden list. It was fine for Dean – he encouraged Dean to sleep with anything that occasionally wore a skirt. I was expected to keep to myself though.”

Brady blinked. “Seriously?”

“Yeah.” He shifted uncomfortably.

“So when you got here you’d never…”

“Right.” 

“Oh.” 

He stared at the floor. “I did manage to sneak in a date to the prom, but at the last minute she decided to wander off with my brother instead. I forget where my dad even was.” Had Dad ordered Dean to do that? It’s not like it was above the man. Of course, it certainly wasn’t above Dean to sneak off with Rachel either. 

“So in less than two months you’ve gone from like nothing to full on threesomes that shouldn’t even be possible in a dorm room bed.”

“Yeah, pretty much.” He laughed at himself. “It is kind of like a full one-eighty, isn’t it?”

“Not really. I mean, it’s not like you ever got a chance to figure out what you wanted or liked or anything in high school like a normal person.” He laughed a little. “Damn but you learn fast, Winchester. I would never have guessed that you were new at any of that.” 

“Uh, thanks? I guess?” He chuckled nervously. “I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

“Was that the first time you did anything with a guy?” Brady’s eyes widened. “Wait, seriously?” Sam nodded, scarlet. “Well, did you like it?” 

“I think that would be kind of obvious.” Sam took a drink. 

“Not necessarily. You could have just been excited because of Ginny.” 

“She does have a certain effect,” the Winchester admitted. “I’m sorry, I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.” 

“Do I look uncomfortable?” He chuckled. “Sam, it’s okay. I’m not going to out you or anything. But I’m kind of curious…”

“About…” 

“Would it be all right if I kissed you?”

In response, Sam rose from his chair and cupped Brady’s face in his hands. Their lips met. 

Later, much later, Sam heard the incoming message alert on his computer. Maybe it was Dean with information about the pukwudgie, or looking for details for a different hunt. Maybe his father had gotten back to him with details about the missing kids. Those were messages for Taurus, a guy who didn’t even exist. Sam Winchester had a life of his own, thank you very much. 

*John *

John had been having a pretty bad Sunday to begin with. It didn’t get better when he had to deal with this Taurus guy again. Leeson insisted that he was the right guy to deal with and he was probably right. Jim vouched for the guy’s work, he’d helped Leeson with a pretty big issue only last week and he’d come through for John himself. But really? This whole, “Winchester will push for a face-to-face meeting, it’s not going to happen” thing? “What the hell is his problem?” he erupted at his fellow hunter. 

“It’s just the way this guy is, John,” the shorter man told him soothingly. Leeson had a scar running down the left side of his face. It ran so close to his eye that it made John’s own eye water. “No one’s ever seen him. He’s real secretive, or maybe he’s just ugly.” He chuckled. “Man found a way to turn my buddy back into a man instead of leaving him chasing after Russian Blues all the time, I say if he wants to hide behind a computer let him.”

“But how did he find a way to do that, huh? How do we know we don’t have to hunt him next?” He turned to the guy. “I’m going to talk to him. Here, forward me that message.” Leeson complied. “For someone who’s never met me you’ve got an awful lot of nerve commenting on my personal habits,” John typed. Maybe that would bring him out into the open.

The answer came back right away – Taurus was online and active. “You know Dean’s seen a pukwudgie right? He can’t take on one of those by himself, and if he’s seen it the thing is targeting him,” John read aloud. “If you want my help with the missing kids, get the information to me electronically. If you don’t, keep me out of it.” 

John punched a wall. “I’m going to find this prick and when I do –“

“He’s got a point, John. We’re the ones going to him for help. He’s got plenty of other things on his plate, apparently. What’s a pukwudgie?”

“It’s a weird little creature that lives up in southeastern Massachusetts. They’re evil, not sure if they’re demonic or not. Why this guy knows that Dean’s being targeted is another story.” He scowled at the screen. “People are dying,” he typed. “It always worked on my other son.” 

“You’ve got another son?” his companion asked.

“Had.” He fought to get his temper down. Sam would have proved useful right about now. He’d be able to track this Taurus asshole down in about half an hour, probably less. 

“I’m sorry, John.” 

“These things happen.” He swallowed past the lump in his throat. “He wasn’t much of a hunter anyway. Insubordinate. Hated the life.” He shrugged. 

The reply had already come in. “Then you’ll get me the information as soon as you can. Or you’ll stop baiting me and hunting your son and start working on finding those kids yourself,” John read aloud. “Son of a bitch.” 

“All right, all right. He’s got a point. I think there’s an all-night copy place about ten miles down the road. Let’s go get them scanned in, then I’ll head home and you can send the files to Taurus. Tomorrow morning we can go pester witnesses, all right?”

They did exactly that. He didn’t hear back from Taurus that night. What the hell was wrong with the guy? Wasn’t he supposed to be a professional? What was he doing sleeping when there was a hunt afoot, when people’s lives were at stake? He wished he’d had the raising of this Taurus guy, he’d have taught him how to prioritize. How to put other people first. Dean knew better. There wasn’t much that he could do to advance the case right now, of course. Not while he was killing time waiting for Taurus to get back to him. Still, there were other things he could do.

He picked up the phone. “Dean,” he greeted when he heard his son’s sleep-rough voice. “Why aren’t you out running?” 

“Sorry, sir. Stitches.” 

“Stitches? What the hell do you have stitches from?”

“Still in from the black dog up in Scituate, sir. And then I got tossed around by the Mad Trucker of Copicut Road, which pulled some of them out, so I had to put them back in. I know I’m slacking, sir, but since they’ve already come out once –“

“No, no. It’s all right. I wouldn’t want you to have to stitch yourself up again.” Damn Sam anyway. He should have been there helping his brother, watching his back. “You shouldn’t have been taking on a black dog by yourself, Dean. It was reckless and dangerous. You’re making me question your judgment.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“Now what’s this I hear about a pukwudgie?” 

The kid sighed. “Taurus called you?”

“No, Dean, he didn’t. I asked him to get involved with another case and he didn’t take kindly to how I pushed him. So he pointed out that you’d attracted the pukwudgie’s attention. How’d you manage to do that?” 

He sighed. “I don’t really know, sir. I just glanced in my side mirror and saw it. It didn’t touch me or talk to me or shoot me or sprinkle anything on me. I didn’t interact with it in any way, sir. I’m not too worried.” He huffed. “Why’d Taurus feel the need to warn you about it anyway?” 

“Probably to distract me from trying to meet face to face with him. The guy is lazy as hell. He’s not interested in helping people, but he’s judgmental as hell about people who are.” 

“Just doesn’t want to get his pretty little hands dirty, just like –“ He stopped himself. “Anyway. I’m fine, I don’t think that a discolored, hairy little kewpie doll is something to worry about. Once the stitches are healed up I might just take a gander at the thing myself. Taurus doesn’t think it’s a good idea but what the hell does that guy know, right? It’s not like he’s ever gone out on the front lines.”

“He did kill a witch, Dean. And he does seem to know a thing or two about magic, I’ll give him that much. You be careful.” 

“Yes, sir.” 

He checked the time. There was time to go check out Stanford again before he had to go meet up with Leeson. He changed his clothes, pulled a cap low over his face and drove in toward campus. He did leave his car a few blocks away before walking toward the Building & Grounds facility, though, where he managed to sneak in through the employee entrance. It was a simple matter to pick the lock on someone’s locker and get a coverall and keys. He then grabbed a random toolbox and some light bulbs. He’d taken a look at the map while he was at the police station last night; it didn’t take him many tries to figure out where Sam’s dorm was.

There weren’t many people awake at this hour on campus. There were a few but not a lot, and more than half of those few looked either stoned or hung over. Anything could have taken them out. Anything. They were so… vulnerable. Inattentive. He found his ire rising. These people were supposed to be some of the smartest in the country? These were the people for whom his youngest son had abandoned his family, his mission?

He wasn’t sure what he wanted out of this, what he expected. Did he want to see Sam? Did he want to interact with him? What would he do or say? He was still furious – even the name raised his blood pressure by a few points. The kid had disobeyed him in all the worst ways and he’d walked out on them, just like John’s own father. He’d walked out on Mary, like the woman who gave him life didn’t even matter. At the same time, there was a reason he’d kept the boy under such tight control. There was a reason that the demonic whatever-they-were had been after him so often as a youth and now he was just a sitting duck. All that defiance, all that rage, all that disobedience – that couldn’t be his own fault. Dean had turned out just fine, so there had to be something about Sammy. He needed to know what influences the kid had fallen under. Hell, there were witches running around campus. And even though Sam infuriated him, he wanted to know that the kid was safe. He honestly did.

The joke of a security guard didn’t even give him a second glance, just saw the coverall and nodded him through. Honestly, he could have been anyone and anything. If he’d been paying anything to keep his son safe he’d be enraged. He found his way to the elevators and up to his son’s floor, where he quickly found the men’s wing. Sam’s room was at the end of the hall. Only one whiteboard for messages graced the exterior, but there were a few. He’d gotten the right room, fortunately. “Nice game, Winchester,” one read. “Sam – you busy Tuesday night? Call me – Lori.” “Winchester – need Latin help desperately. –Travis.” 

John shook his head. The messages just made him see red. This stuff was crap. Games, and dates – what the hell was the boy doing? Had he seriously just taken off so he could play stupid games instead of doing his job and being responsible? Selfish bastard. He took the eraser that hung by the side of the whiteboard and erased the notes. 

That was when the door swung halfway open. “I’ve already called campus security,” Sam growled. Most of him was hidden behind the door. “I’m not putting up your bail money.” He moved to close the door.

John stuck his foot in the gap before the teen could get the door entirely shut. “You don’t get to shut me out, boy. I’m your father.” What the hell was he doing home anyway? He should be out running, training. He hadn’t planned to interact directly with Sam, but now that he was he couldn’t help but be furious. 

“Whatever happened to ‘don’t you ever come back?’” John heard the unmistakable sound of a safety being clicked off. “You’re the one that shut me out, not the other way around. Now Go. Away.” 

“There’s a hunt around here. Missing kids. Get your ass in gear and come with me.” Why the kid deserved another chance John didn’t know, but he made the offer nonetheless. Maybe there was part of him that still hoped that the boy could still be reached on some level, that all wasn’t lost. Maybe he wanted to prove to himself that the boy was beyond redemption.

“No.”

He shoved his way into the room – little more than a closet, really. Everything inside was meticulously organized, at least as far as John could see. Not so much as a piece of paper was out of place on the desk. Only the bed looked untidy, possibly because it had only been recently unoccupied. John didn’t have time to really examine it before Sam’s left fist came up in a vicious uppercut, sending him flying back out into the hall. 

Sam stood there, framed in the doorway. He’d only been wearing his pajama bottoms, no shirt, and John could see that two months off hadn’t softened the kid up at all. He’d felt it too with that blow that had taken him off his feet. His chest heaved as he fought to get himself under control. “You selfish little brat,” he spat. “You owe this family.” Okay, that really hadn’t been where he wanted to go with this. Getting a punch to the jaw from his estranged younger son had just set him off. Two months and still all he was getting was defiance and insubordination. 

The door closed and locked. He saw red and began to kick. How many blows could the door take before it came down? With one that whiteboard, with its messages to his son from people who had no idea what waited in the dark for him or for them, came crashing to the ground and broke into three pieces. “You open this door you worthless piece of garbage!” John shouted with another kick. 

Other doors started to open, and John was starting to realize that maybe this had been a stupid thing to do. He hadn’t intended for things to get this out of hand, but here he was, screaming at a closed and locked door as a bunch of eighteen-year-old kids looked at him like he was some kind of lunatic. Like he was some kind of monster. 

“Hey, buddy,” said a handsome young blond with the body of a swimmer, “how about if we just calm down and talk like rational adults here, all right?”

“This doesn’t concern you, kid,” John barked. “This is between me and my no-good –“ kick “-worthless –“ kick “ – ungrateful –“ kick “ –insubordinate son.” The door did not buckle. “A son who will be dropping out of Stanford as soon as he gets his cowardly little ass out of that room.”

Another young man, shorter than the first and dark-skinned, snorted. “Yeah, that would work out great for me since he’s the only one ahead of me in our pre-law program but not gonna happen. You need to get yourself under control, man.” 

Blond looked at Mouthy. “Harris,” he hissed. “Don’t sass the psycho, man. He’s trying to kill Sam but he might decide you’d be a fine substitute.” 

Harris snorted. “Only if I stand on your shoulders, Brady.” 

The elevator doors opened and John saw the hats on two deputies over the sea of young men. The little bastard really had called the cops. Well, the other frosh should be able to keep them from catching up. Blond Brady reached out and grabbed for him but only managed to grab the ID badge stuck to his coveralls as he ran for the emergency exit and raced down the stairs.

He heard the sirens in the distance and took the time to tear off the rest of the coverall before hotfooting it toward the truck. Hopefully they hadn’t found it yet; he’d parked far enough off campus that no one should make the connection. Keeping to the backs of buildings and alleys, he managed to avoid the police until he got off campus, where he kept his pace calm and his head high. 

He seethed all the way back to his truck, but what had he really expected? The kid had walked out on them. He and Sam had never been close, they’d never liked each other – had they? And since the kid had hit adolescence he’d just been pushing, pushing, pushing John away as far as he could. He’d told them, over and over, that he wasn’t going to stick around, that he wasn’t going to hunt and that he’d rather be dead than dedicate his life to their cause. John just hadn’t been willing to listen. At least he knew the kid was alive and safe – as safe as a normal person could be, anyway. Whether he was cavorting with demons or running amok with witches remained to be seen. 

He went back to the motel and got cleaned up before meeting up with Leeson, who noticed the bruising on his face. “The hell happened to you?” the scarred man wanted to know. 

"Bar fight,” he replied shortly. 

They had time to meet up with four of the victims’ families that day. It was a challenge even making it that far, because whatever was taking those kids was going to towns scattered across the landscape. At least most of the families spoke English. One of the kids had been Russian and an only child; that interview was a complete bust. Another had been some kind of Latino, John couldn’t quite be sure of his parents’ country of origin and they were skittish enough of the badge that he didn’t want to press. They needed to bring an older child in to translate which just got awkward – John was no good with kids, no good at all, and here he was grilling a seven year old about creepy strangers leading up to his little brother’s disappearance. Happy Halloween, kid, guess what’s under the next latex mask you see?

They went back to the motel to debrief and check messages. They actually had one from Taurus – John had kind of given up on hearing from him when the guy actually went to bed instead of working when people were depending on him. “Okay, so you’re in luck. My workplace is on lockdown thanks to a gun-wielding psycho,” Taurus complained. “That would be you, Winchester. Since I’d like to actually get out and live my life that bumps you to the front of the list.” John punched the wall. 

Leeson looked at him. “Bar fight, huh?”

“Don’t ask.”

“There is no indication of any relationship between the victims or their families. They come from towns separated by hours of travel. Their races, economic backgrounds, cultural backgrounds, everything – all very different. I’ve attached a map of the area, though, and it does show that you can look at the abduction sites as spokes of a wheel with the hub at Henry W. Coe State Park, which for the record is huge. “I took the liberty of taking a look at police reports from the abductions themselves. None of the adults on the scene noticed anything out of the ordinary. Children on the scene, on the other hand, remember hearing music in the distance. I’ve attached copies of the files so you can look for yourselves if you don’t feel like taking my word for it. Each child remembers hearing something different, but they all remember hearing something if very faint. I would be willing to bet that the kids who were taken heard the music more loudly than the others.”

“That sounds like the story from when we were kids,” Leeson commented. “You know the one, the Pied Piper or whatever.” 

“Huh,” John nodded. “Do you mean like the Pied Piper?” he typed before turning to his companion. “You want to order a pizza or something?” 

“Sounds like a plan. You like mushrooms?”

By the time that the pizza arrived they had a response from Taurus. “That’s an interesting line of thought. I’ll see what I can dig up. I’m pretty sure that’s not something my usual contacts would have heard of, but if there’s a fairy tale about it there has to be more lore somewhere, right?”

“All right. Keep at it. We don’t need more dead kids,” he ordered. 

The reply was almost instantaneous. “Not your soldier, Winchester. And before you get any ideas about sending campus into another lockdown just to keep me on target keep in mind that I already know that you’re at the Stone Rose motel off El Camino Real. You stay the hell away from Stanford.” 

“How did you know it was me that sent the school into lockdown?” he typed back quickly.

“If I can get police reports from eight jurisdictions before lunch do you really think it’s a problem to figure out why I suddenly have a very unwelcome day off?”

Leeson chuckled. “I told you this guy’s good, John. What do you say we let him do his thing while we hit a bar and blow off a little steam? There isn’t much we can do for anyone all wound up tight like this.” 

The guy was right, of course. And John did need to wash the botched reunion with Sam from his mind. “Yeah, let’s do that.” 

*Dean * 

He was surprised as hell to hear from Dad on Monday morning. He didn’t tell him about all of his injuries, because he didn’t need to know. What was he going to do, drop his job and rush back to Fall River to nurse little Dean back to health? That was just stupid. He did consider disclosing the fact that Taurus and Sammy were apparently buddies or something because that was the kind of thing that Dad would probably want to know, but he thought better of it. Dad was apparently relying on the guy for information now, and he didn’t want to take a resource away from Dad. Dad might expect him to do the research then, and he just couldn’t be having that. It wasn’t like he couldn’t do research, but he hated doing it and he couldn’t do it half as well as Taurus.

Plus, if Dad knew that Taurus and Sammy were friends he’d probably forbid Dean from having contact with him too. Dean was selfish. He knew he should be prepared to spend weeks, months, years like this, having only the most superficial contacts outside of Dad, but he just didn’t want that. Taurus wasn’t family of course. That didn’t mean it didn’t make Dean smile when he saw a note in his in box. That didn’t mean it didn’t make the crap apartment seem less cold. So he kept his mouth shut and listened to his dad’s advice about the pukwudgie. 

There was a lot more sense to what Dad said than to what Taurus said – caution, sure, but none of this “stay away” crap. They were hunters. Not just hunters, but Winchesters. They didn’t hide from things. They didn’t stay away from the supernatural; they took it head on and kicked its ass or died trying. And none of them had actually, you know, died. So maybe Taurus needed to stop wringing his hands like an old lady and let the professionals do their jobs. 

He did a quick web search and didn’t find a whole lot. Apparently pukwudgies weren’t exactly the subject of a huge amount of Internet conversation. There was a little bit of information – blah blah pre-Columbian, blah blah poison, blah blah. This was what he kept Sammy around for, damn it. Fortunately something came in from Taurus around noon. “Your father decided to hunt your brother and has caused a lockdown of the entire campus,” the message began. “Please tell me you’re not going out to Freetown to mess with the pukwudgie.” 

Dad was hunting Sam? Seriously? Dad was in California? “What did Sam do to deserve to be hunted?” he shot back.

The answer came back an hour later. “Breathed, apparently.”

Dean exhaled. “Look, you don’t actually know our family. You don’t know what’s going on with them, with us. I doubt that Dad was actually hunting Sammy, I’m pretty sure he’d never hurt him unless he had to. But if he did decide that he had to I’m sure he had a good reason.” He paused before hitting send. “Was anyone hurt?”

“The door to your brother’s room was damaged. Your father was punched in the jaw but no blood was drawn. Police reports indicate that your father escaped campus. If you have any influence on him at all, Dean, I’d really recommend that you discourage him from coming back to campus. He didn’t exactly make a great impression on campus security with the whole breaking into a dorm and trying to kick someone’s door down while screaming like a lunatic and threatening to abduct him. In front of witnesses, I should point out.” 

Dean cursed. Why had he been there in the first place? If he were really hunting Sammy like Taurus said he’d have just killed him, no ands, ifs or butts. Unless Sammy had caught him before he could – but no, Sammy couldn’t have. Sammy wasn’t that good. But why would Dad have tried to kidnap him? Had he tried to bring him out on a hunt? Seriously? Had the whole “disowning” thing just been a big “give him time and space and he’ll come crawling back” thing? No, that wasn’t like Dad at all. Sammy was dead to them and that was how it was going to stay. Taurus had a point, though. Doing all that in front of other people would only make it harder for him to do whatever it was that he was planning to do in the first place, be it reason with Sam and bring him back or drag his sorry ass home whether he was willing or no or just check up on him to make sure he was okay. Or hunt him, if Dad thought he needed to be hunted. 

But what could Sam have possibly done to have earned that? Yeah, he was a selfish little brat who had walked away from his family. Who had turned his back on Mom when he knew Mom came before everything for all of them. That made it okay to cut him off, cast him aside. Declare him dead. He was still human, and except for witches (and the occasional hunter who had apparently decided that Sammy was fair game when they were kids) they didn’t go after humans. Had Sammy turned that bad in only two months? Had he become a witch himself? He’d always had a certain gift for some of the more ritualistic aspects of hunting – finding counterspells, digging up magical lore and formulae – but actually consorting with demons and dark spirits and crap?

He picked up the phone. “Hi, Pastor Jim?”

“Dean Winchester!” his old friend greeted. “It’s always nice to hear your voice! How are you?”

“I’m okay. I’m a little banged up from a case, but I’ve had worse. Listen, I’m worried about Sammy.”

“He’s enjoying school. To the best of my knowledge he hasn’t encountered anything supernatural recently.”

Recently? What the hell? “Then why is Dad hunting him?” 

The sound of coffee being spewed across the room was unmistakable, and a little funny. “Would you care to elaborate?”

“Stanford went on lockdown, according to your buddy Taurus. Here we go, he just sent me a copy of the police report. I guess Dad showed up at Sam’s dorm room this morning and tried to break in and, uh, kidnap him?” 

“Oh for Pete’s sake…” Dean didn’t think he’d heard the priest come nearly as close to swearing as that in his entire life. “I’ll see if I can talk some sense into your father, but believe me, Dean. Your brother is not doing anything that would make him fair game.”

“I’m kind of worried here, sir.” He sighed. “Do you know anything about pukwudgies?” 

“Only what your brother told me a few years ago, I’m afraid. He and your father spent some time near Dighton while you were somewhere else, I forget where you were. I think your brother killed time researching a lot of local lore, which he shared with me. Porcupines come to mind.” 

“Okay. Well, tell Sammy to stay safe, if you talk to him. And tell my dad that the cops are after him hardcore.”

“Will do, Dean. You stay safe too.” 

Next Dean went out and bought some supplies – specifically a compass and a small, personal GPS device. If he could find and take down a pukwudgie he would prove himself to his father as a hunter. Maybe then his father wouldn’t just ditch him when he caught a case out in California.

The next morning he got up early. He threw a few water bottles into a backpack and drove out to the woods as soon as it was light enough. He parked his baby in a regular parking lot, brought some choice supplies – not that he knew what to use to take the thing down, but he didn’t really expect to kill a pukwudgie today. He was just scouting. He figured consecrated rounds were a good start. An iron crowbar couldn’t hurt either, because even if the thing couldn’t be hurt by iron most things would get slowed down by a heavy iron crowbar to the knee. He took off down the first side trail he came to, being careful to mark his passage at regular intervals. He had a map, of course, and he marked off his trail on the map but he wasn’t looking for the scenic hike or the safe route. He was looking for something specific. 

After two hours he paused at the intersection of the narrow foot trail and what looked like it might be a deer path for water and saw the first hint of what he was looking for: a single porcupine quill, pointing along the deer trail. He marked his path on the map, set a marker on the trail and followed it. It didn’t take long for him to figure out that this was not exactly a pathway meant for human feet. He found himself crouching more often than not, trying to avoid branches. The scent of rotting leaves, while not exactly unusual for late October, threatened to overwhelm back here and the sun seemed much farther away. More than once did he narrowly avoid stepping on a branch only to have it slither away from him. The way the light filtered through the trees seemed different back here too. It had been a bright sunny day or at least the makings of one when he’d come back here. Now the light had taken on a weak, watery look, with visible Jacob’s ladders and even bright balls of light seeming to dance in the air right in front of him. And the bugs – the bugs were something else. They should have been done this late in the season. Wasn’t New England in the tundra or something? Hadn’t they already had their big hard frost? (And wasn’t that kind of knowledge what he had a little brother for?) For the most part he was able to keep the little biters away from him but one or two got a bite or a sting in. 

He stayed on the deer path for another three hours before he passed a marker he knew he’d already left. “Shit,” he said, sinking down. A sudden wave of dizziness came over him. He leaned against a tree and grabbed at the water bottle. After a long pull of water he checked his GPS. Nothing, nothing at all. The thing was completely dead except for a single letter on the display: “S.” He got up again. Well, he’d gotten here by heading north-northeast, right? He’d just have to head south-southwest. Taking out his compass he struck out for the Impala. An hour into his return trip, though, he began to regret that he’d come. He’d cracked a few ribs in his encounter with the O’Rourke spirit, and maybe he should have rested up a little while longer before taking on a hunt for a creature he didn’t actually understand because what was normally just a sharp ache that affected how he slept on the stupid couch had become a real unpleasant constriction to how he breathed. And he’d been out here for six hours now and his feet were starting to hurt, and since when did that happen? He’d been doing this his entire life. He could hike for days, and what was up with the fire in his joints now too? The light balls kept dancing in front of him, as though they were trying to lure him off the path or something which was just stupid. Light didn’t lure you off a path.

By the time he made it back to the Impala the sun was starting to go down. Sweat drenched his body and he’d consumed every single bottle he’d brought with him. Thank God he had ibuprofen in the glove box; he reached in and grabbed twice as much as the recommended dosage and drove himself blearily back to the apartment, where he took a shower. It was in disrobing for the shower that he found the three porcupine quills. Hadn’t Pastor Jim said something about porcupines? Had he encountered the pukwudgie and just not known it? He washed up, noting how much better the hot water and steam made him feel, and sat down to email both Jim and Taurus. He left out the part about getting sick, though. There was no need to make them worry. 

He heard back from Taurus within a couple of hours. “You absolutely had a pukwudgie encounter,” came the reply. “Stay the hell out of the woods and hope it doesn’t follow you home. Those lights were just one form the pukwudgie can take. They try to lure people off the path and off cliffs or into water or to wander themselves to death out wherever and then they own and control their souls when they die. And trust me, they are not benevolent.” 

Dean shook his head. “If they’re able to do that then someone has to go take them out, dude. They’re evil.” 

“They’re not evil. They hate humanity but that doesn’t necessarily make them evil. Have you had a bunch of pukwudgie incidents near you lately? No. I checked. There’s been nothing pukwudgie related in that area because people have the sense to stay on the trails and to not go chasing after pukwudgies. Don’t go looking for trouble with them and they’ll probably leave you alone, man.”

He shook his head. “That’s not how it works. Not with us. If it’s supernatural it has to go. Who’s to say that it’s not going to become aggressive tomorrow, or the day after? Or if the park needs to open up that section to put in a water line or a sewer line for the reservation or something? We can’t wait until someone actually dies, we have to get them before they can harm an actual person.” He put the porcupine quills together. They didn’t look the same. In fact, they didn’t even look like they’d come from the same animal. Not that Dean was exactly an expert on porcupine morphology or anything like that, but the coloring on the quills was different and of course the thickness was different. He went to get some whiskey, eschewing a glass in favor of drinking straight from the bottle. It wasn’t like Dad was coming home soon if he was busy hunting Sam.

By the time he sat back down he had an answer from his weird little pen pal. “So you’re saying we should maybe find all of the potential criminals and execute them before they murder people? Because there are humans who are statistically more likely to commit murder and humans who are not, but that doesn’t mean that all of the people who are statistically likely to commit murder do. Or that the people who are statistically unlikely to commit murder don’t. But from what you’re saying it doesn’t matter, the ones who are statistically likely to commit murder should all be put down because they might do it someday and everyone else has to be kept safe.”

Dean had to laugh. “You sound just like my kid brother.” 

He didn’t hear back from Taurus for a while after that. When he did, all he got back was, “I guess he and I have a lot in common. Either way, you can’t kill a pukwudgie by yourself.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The pukwudgie is an actual local legendary creature and its existence was the entire reason I wrote this work. My daughter has become convinced that there is one living under the back deck. I'm equally certain that it's just a feral cat.


	4. When The Rooster Crows At The Break Of Dawn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam gets a visit from a helpful high school buddy. John gets a fortunate visit from a crimson fish. Dean gets a cold bath.

*Sam * 

Sam slept alone that night when he finally got to sleep. He wouldn’t have objected to some company, frankly, and people were being pretty cool considering that his personal family drama had just become very up front and personal for everyone, but being cool and sympathetic did not necessarily equate to a desire to be in the room with the madman’s target if he were to suddenly appear again. Fortunately he had plenty of work to keep him busy, between the missing kids and Dean’s freaking pukwudgie encounter. 

A quiet rage began to rise in him. He’d tried so hard to get away. Maybe he shouldn’t have agreed to help his family. Seriously, how badly could they need his help if he was forced to hide behind a secret identity like some kind of demented super hero fetishist to do it? Dad had been doing just fine on his own without “Taurus” to do his research for him. It wasn’t like Sam had provided any actual insight for him when he’d lived with the guy, not that he’d used or valued in any way. Now that the words were coming from a guy with a different face or no face at all it was different? 

And Dean – well, what did he really expect from Dean? He loved Dean, loved him more than anyone in the world, but he had to accept the fact that Dean was John’s good little soldier. Dean hadn’t been threatened into cutting him out. He’d wanted Dean to come with him, hoped that maybe they could maintain some kind of actual relationship but who’d he been kidding? Dean had cut him out all by himself. “Dad had a reason.” Seriously, just like that? The big brother who had raised him – changed his diapers, taught him to walk and to read and to fight – was willing to just write him off as fair game just because Dad said so? How was that even possible? Because he had a mind of his own? Because he’d dared to carve out a life of his own? Because he was smart enough to say, “Thank you, but no, I think I’d like to live a little longer than twenty-four please?”

And now Dean had gotten himself into something more than he could handle and he’d blame Sam for not being there to have his back. He wouldn’t blame Dad for ditching him in Fall River to go hunt Sam down, because if Dad said that a nineteen year old kid who wanted a stable roof over his goddamn head and maybe to know what a goddamn hug felt like once in a while needed to be killed well then guess what? Dean sure as hell wasn’t going to think twice about it. Dean sure wasn’t going to blame himself for going after something that he’d been warned repeatedly couldn’t be taken on alone. No, it was Sam’s fault for leaving, because Sam should have been there to mire himself in the stupid right there behind his big brother. In the twisted logic that only made sense if your last name was Winchester that was what a family was for and Sam had crapped all over that. 

And Dad – Dad had just waltzed in and done his best to emphasize his status as the resident freak to the entire damn school. It wasn’t enough to cut him off. It wasn’t enough to separate him from Dean forever, to make sure he would never have anywhere to go for the school breaks or anyone to introduce a partner to. (Would he have wanted to?) No, Dad had to come and try to kick down his door and scream and yell and threaten and bully. Dad had to come and try to destroy the life he was making for himself for no reason other than the sheer joy of destroying what was Sam’s.

He should have shot him.

The thought came unbidden and brought him up short. He shouldn’t have shot him, of course he shouldn’t have shot him. The man might be an obsessed, abusive, drunken bastard but he was still his father. He was okay with never seeing him again – more than okay with it – but that didn’t mean that he wanted the guy dead. Plus, shooting him would probably have gotten him kicked off campus at the very least if not expelled and possibly arrested. Punching him in the face had felt pretty good, though.

Ugh. Part of the reason he’d been so desperate to get away was to avoid this type of feeling, and he’d been doing so well too. He’d thought it was just puberty or maybe just him – you know, whatever made him feel so damn unclean all the time – but getting away from Dad had done wonders for his mood. He still got annoyed, sure, but he didn’t have that ever-present urge to just lash out and hurt something or someone seething right under the surface. And now… well, now. 

He flung himself onto his bed and pulled the blankets up. Sleep found him quickly, much to his surprise. Of course sleep brought with it dreams, which had their own issues. Sam had been dreaming of Hell, or at least of the place his brain had decided was Hell, for most of his life. It couldn’t actually be Hell because it wasn’t so bad, really. It smelled bad, sulfurous, but it wasn’t like there were tortured souls and burning flesh and things like that. It was just where his subconscious mind liked to go to sort through things he supposed, and it went there a lot more often when he was stressed. Having his father show up and try to batter down his door counted as a stressor. 

Deep breathing was usually a recourse to him when he found his rage getting away from him but really, the stench of rotten eggs just didn’t do much to calm Sam down. He looked around the grotto-like space. It never changed much. What did it say about him that his mind’s safe space was Hell? He stretched a little and ambled around a bit. He never really got to see much beyond this area, although he knew logically that there had to be more. Maybe this was Hell’s waiting room? It’s foyer? The vestibule? 

He heard steps and he tensed. No one had ever tried to harm him here but there was a first time for everything and hell, Dad had tried to burst into his dorm room today so he wasn’t exactly feeling complacent. Fortunately the figure that came into view was familiar, even if he hadn’t seen it in years. About three feet tall, the hairy little man wore clothes that seemed to have been stitched together from old flannel and what might have been porcupine quills. “Stan!” he greeted, doubling over to catch the creature in an embrace.

“Sam Winchester!” the pukwudgie greeted with a huge, eerie smile, squeezing back with a strength that belied his size. “I knew I’d find you here.”

The youth laughed. “It should probably bother me that you just expect to find me in Hell,” he commented. “But it’s just a dream, so whatever. Are you really showing up in my dreams or are you just a figment of my subconscious?”

“Does it matter?” his childhood friend retorted. “And do you really think I’d tell you either way? Where would be the fun in that?” 

Sam just laughed again. “I’ve missed you, man,” he admitted. “You should come out to California. It’s beautiful out here, I wish you could see it.”

“Er, did you really just suggest that a pukwudgie come out to territory otherwise unmenaced by our presence?” Stan smirked. “Because we really don’t like humans. Like, at all.”

“You’ve got a point,” the student sighed, sitting on the ground. It was warm beneath him – well, it was Hell. Of course it was warm. “But you’re different.”

“I’m really not.”

“You like me.”

“You’re the one who’s different, Sam, and you know it. But maybe you’re just not ready to hear it.”

Sam chuckled and ran a hand through his hair. “Oh, man. I’m so not different. I got out, Stan.”

“Seriously?” 

“Yeah. Seriously. I got away. I’m at college now. Surrounded by normal people, doing normal things. For crying out loud, I’m going to be a lawyer. I’m going to have a real roof over my head. I’m going to have a home. I’m going to read books for fun. I can go to a doctor if I need to, I’ve got steady meals. It’s awesome.” 

“Huh. So if you’re there, who’s the guy who stumbled into my path the other day in Freetown?”

Sam’s heart sank. “Guy?” he asked, rubbing at his face.

“Yeah. He’s a little shorter than you are, dirty blond hair. Smells like you, though, which is why I came to find you.” Stan cackled. “He’s got to be a real hurting cookie right now, let me tell you.” 

“He told me he didn’t get poisoned!” 

“He lied,” the pukwudgie told him flatly. “Who is he?”

“He’s my brother. Stan, please. Is there any kind of antidote?”

“How can he be your brother? He’s human. All the way human.” 

“Can you stop with that? Same mother. Same father. That makes him my brother, and he raised me, so can we please just not hurt him? Please?” He met his friend’s eyes and tried as hard as he could to convey the seriousness of his request. 

Stan grinned. “Sure thing, Sam. Just one thing – you have to call him, on your phone, and tell him what the cure is.”

“I… I can’t.” 

“What do you mean you can’t? You’re so desperate to keep him alive but you can’t be bothered to call him on the phone?”

“That’s not it! He won’t take my calls! He changed his phone number so I’d stop calling.” Sam stood up and walked away a little bit. “He, uh, he wasn’t so happy that I’d left.”

“Uh-huh. So you’re here begging for his pathetic human life and he can’t even appreciate the gift he was given when he had you.” 

“Please,” Sam snorted. “I’m hardly a gift. He put up with me for nineteen years. It’s my fault he had to live the way he did – the way he does, you know? If he wants to wash his hands of me because I’m not willing to live that way, that’s fine. I just don’t want… I can’t let him die.” 

Stan rose too. He inhaled deeply, and then he sighed. “All right. But only because I want to be on the winning side at the end of the day, you get what I’m saying? You need to remember this when your time comes.” 

Sam shook his head. Stan had always said things like that. “My time. Sure thing. When I become king of the world I’ll remember that.” 

“You’d better, Sam. This is a big deal. Here’s the thing. I’m not going to heal him all at once. He’s got to earn it.”

“Stan –“ 

The pukwudgie held up a hand. “Hear me out. You’re obviously hurt by the fact that he’s cut you out, and I don’t like that. You’re my friend, which is the only way that a hunter is getting cured in the first place. I’m going to let him not die, but he’s going to have to jump through some hoops for anything more than that. I’m sure you’ve got some way of getting in touch with him, some relative, or else he couldn’t have told you he didn’t get poisoned. You’re going to tell him to wait for instructions, and I’m going to make sure that you get the instructions to give him until I can communicate with him directly, okay?” 

Sam considered. It was risky, but he couldn’t think of a better way to save Dean. “Okay. Thanks, Stan.”

“Just remember when your time comes. Now – talk to me about this ‘college’ of yours, and I’ll tell you about my favorite pranks from the last three years.”

Sam bit the inside of his cheek. He desperately wanted to wake himself up and go reach out to Dean, but he also didn’t want to offend the creature that held Dean’s life in his hands. He was pretty sure that Stan wouldn’t actually permanently harm his brother. The pukwudgie had this bizarre idea about Sam someday being someone important and wanted to stay on his good side. Still, Sam was too smart to be willing to bank on that. And to be honest, Stan was the only person who had known him back in the day. So he spoke with his old friend, and he listened. Stan disapproved heartily of his helping either his father or other hunters – “That will only come back to bite you in the ass, Sam –“ and told him about some entertaining pranks that he’d played on some “unpleasant” hikers in the forest that had been up to no good at all. “You giving me that Shakespeare book gave me all sorts of excellent ideas,” he chortled. “I guess the English were good for something after all.” Stan listened to his confliction about sex and friendship, although Sam wasn’t sure that a quasi-demonic entity was really the best source of advice. 

When he woke up the lockdown was lifted. He sent a quick email with instructions to Dean, telling him how to use the poison from the quills themselves to make an antidote that would help save his life at least. “This won’t cure you completely. There’s a process you need to go through to cleanse yourself that I could have gotten you started on earlier if you’d told me you were poisoned in the first place,” he chided. He wanted to scream and yell, to rant and rave, but he couldn’t. If he did Dean would never listen. “I’ll let you know when I know more. Until then stay out of the goddamn woods – I don’t know that a different pukwudgie would use the same poison, and you’re nowhere near fighting form yet.” 

Then he sent a message to John Winchester. “Dean’s been poisoned by the pukwudgie,” he told him tersely. “I’m working on a cure. It’s going to be a multi-step process.” 

After that he left a message for Meli letting her know that he was going for his run at the gym and he did so. There were classes and meetings and meals – not that Sam was really feeling up to eating much, but he was able to squeeze in an extra workout. He got a little work done on the Pied Piper case, although most of what he came up with was a dead end. As near as he could tell, no version of the myth in Europe ended with the Piper being slain. The earliest ended with the children drowning, so he created a quick search algorithm to go looking for any historical drowning clusters or any indication of children washing up in the current mishap. While his little electronic spiders did their work he started poking around looking for anything on what the Piper might have been. 

He emailed Leeson. “I need more information about the kidnappings, specifically the sites. Were there any other details that stood out that didn’t make it into the police reports? Specifically were there any scents that stood out?” he asked them. “I’m thinking sulfur, but non-demonic forces could have left scent evidence as well.”

Dean emailed him. “How did you know I got hit by the little bastard?” he wanted to know. “And yeah, I feel like crap.” 

“I know because I’m pretty good at what I do, Dean,” he replied. It wasn’t like he could come out and say that the pukwudgie involved was a friend of his, after all. “You’re going to feel like crap for a while. I’m assuming that you made the cure that I told you to?” 

An hour later he got the reply back. That was okay. It was all billable time, since he could work on translations. “Yeah. It tasted like a dog’s ass, but I made it.”

“Why do you have a basis for comparison?” he retorted. “I’ll let you know when I have something on what the next step in the ritual is.” He shook his head. Dean was going to be okay, and maybe – just maybe – this would teach him to look before he leapt. Or to listen to people who knew more about the territory than he did, whichever.

He turned back to his work and to his carefully planned schedule. 

*John * 

John and Leeson spent their Tuesday checking into what Taurus had asked about, the scent evidence. No one had written down any evidence of any strong odors, which let demons out of the picture. They split up to interview kids who had been on the scene and the kids involved all spoke about music. That wasn’t news. There were certain commonalities, though. They all remembered hearing some kind of a “honking” instrument. One teacher had heard enough to suggest that it might have been “a really badly tuned clarinet, or maybe an oboe.” It was something to go on.

On Wednesday morning Leeson messaged Taurus with the information. John called Dean. “What’s this I hear about you getting poisoned?” he demanded as soon as the boy answered the phone. 

“It’s not a big deal, sir. I’ll be fine in a day or two. Risks of the job, sir.” 

And he’d taught him that, hadn’t he? Only that wasn’t the lesson he wanted him to take away. “A pukwudgie’s poison isn’t something you can just get over, Dean. Now why am I just hearing about it from some outsider? What if I’d needed you? How are you supposed to come and help me if you’re laid up or dead? There’s just two of us now. I can’t count on you to help me hunt down the thing that killed your mother if you’re making crap decisions like this, hiding serious injuries!” 

“Sorry, sir. Taurus was able to tell me how slow the poison, sir. There’s a cleansing ritual he’s working on. He should be able to get it to me in a few days. I’ll be able to get myself better then.”

Freaking Taurus. “Why didn’t you call me?”

“I didn’t want you to worry, sir. I know you’re working on a case.” The kid sounded like a kicked puppy and now John felt even worse. On the one hand he’d wanted to put the fear of God, or rather of John, into him. On the other hand, the whole point was that he was supposed to be making the kid more independent, right? “I’m sorry, sir.”

“And Taurus was just able to tell you how to slow the poison, huh?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“Any idea how he knew? I’ve been doing this for close on twenty years and I’ve never heard of a way to slow down or stop pukwudgie poison.” He glanced at the calendar as he said it. It was almost nineteen years exactly – he’d let the time get away from him. That was probably a good thing.

“No, sir. He said he used to live around here, though. Maybe he learned from a local. I mean, he really flipped out when he heard I’d seen a pukwudgie. He seems to know a lot about the area.”

“Mmm.” John grunted. “The guy’s useful, but I feel like he’s a little too useful, you know? See if you can get any information out of him. I’m worried that he might be involved with something unsavory.” 

“Aren’t we all sir?” 

“Don’t go getting smart with me, boy. It doesn’t suit you.” 

“No, sir.”

“Keep me posted about any changes.”

“Yes, sir.” 

They hung up without further formalities. After a quick dinner at a local diner where the burgers consisted almost entirely of grease and the fries of Styrofoam John suggested that they hit a bar and do a little hustling. His coffers could use a little replenishing considering how much he’d spent on keeping up appearances for Adam, and the truck wasn’t exactly light on gasoline either. Leeson opted to go home instead – he was local and didn’t want to crap where he bedded down, which John supposed made sense. Why a hunter thought he had any business having a home in the first place was a little beyond John, but whatever. If he wanted all the creepy-crawlies finding him that was his business. 

The next morning he and Leeson got together early to go out to Coe State Park. They each took maps and bottled water. Leeson had a personal GPS system just in case; the place was huge. They would stick together. There were too many things that could go wrong otherwise. “Taurus says that all of the legends about the Pied Piper involve water,” Leeson pointed out. “The earliest stories have him drowning kids in the nearest river, so let’s start with any bodies of water on the map. We can move on from there, okay?”

“We still don’t know what we’re actually dealing with,” John pointed out.

“Well, no,” his companion admitted. “But we can hopefully get some clues. Who knows, maybe we’ll even find some sign of one of the missing kids!”

The itinerant hunter shook his head. It sure must be nice to have that kind of unbridled optimism. How he’d managed to avoid having it burned away escaped the Midwesterner. “All right. Coit Pond looks like the biggest body of water on the map. Why don’t we start with that? It seems as good a place as any.” Leeson agreed with a shrug and the pair set out. They parked at the Hunting Hollow entrance and cut up the Steer Ridge trail, which John had to admit was actually kind of lovely even in late October. They took a left at the Spike Jones Trail, then a right at the Grizzly Gulch Trail, and then they cut up the Dexter and Kelly Lake trails. The terrain, John had to admit, was not gentle. He was glad he was in the kind of shape that he was – that he kept the kind of grueling regimen he did, that he maintained a strict guard against any kind of softness for himself or his boys. Not a lot of other guys his age would be able to keep this kind of pace and be in shape to handle what they found at Kelly Lake. 

The child was about six years old, male. John remembered his name as being Mario Alvarez, one of the missing children from their case. His hair was heavy with water and he was stark naked. John hurriedly took off his shirt to cover the boy while Leeson took out a silver knife and held it to the boy. He did not react. “Not a shifter,” he announced, pulling out his phone. 

“Is he breathing?” 

John checked. “Barely. I’ve got a pulse.” The boy had lost weight, quite a bit of it, but had no other visible injuries. “Don’t use my real name, Leeson. Seems there was a bit of a misunderstanding over at Stanford.” 

The local rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I know. Hi, dispatch? My buddy and I were hiking up here by Kelly Lake in Coe State Park and we found a little boy unconscious by the trail. He’s naked and out cold, but he’s breathing and has a pulse. We’ll stay with him until help comes. Sure, I’ll stay on the line so you can get a fix on my signal.”

John touched the boy’s face. He could remember caressing Dean’s face in much the same way, checking for fever when he’d fallen ill at school. He couldn’t remember doing the same for Sam. Why was that? Was it because he’d offloaded responsibility for such things onto Dean as soon as Mary was out of the picture, in proper chain-of-command fashion? Or was it because Sam had never gotten sick? Or was it, as he suspected to himself, that Sam would never let John see him sick, or injured, or vulnerable? He could remember the kid hiding a broken arm for a week rather than let John examine him. (And of course he’d reacted predictably, which hadn’t exactly increased the trust between them had it?)

This boy, though, he was responsive. As the back of the hunter’s hand slid across his forehead his eyes fluttered open, wide and terrified. He relaxed a little when he saw that he was with strangers, though, and that set off so many alarm bells in John’s head that it was almost laughable. He hadn’t thought he even had parental instincts anymore. Had he had them to begin with? “Are you the police?” he asked innocently.

“No, Mario,” John told him in as gentle a voice he was capable of. “No, we aren’t the police, but we’re here to help. Can you tell us what happened to you?” 

He nodded, exhausted. “I heard the music. I… I knew I shouldn’t go, but I couldn’t… I couldn’t not go. I couldn’t stop.” As he spoke, John sat down on the ground and helped the boy to sit up a little, cradling him and supporting him against his own body. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d managed to offer any support to a young person like that. Probably Dean, the last time he’d been seriously injured by a… what had it been again? He’d been clawed something fierce and John had sent Sam to get the car… “I fell asleep and when I woke up I was in the dark. It was cold and wet, and I could hear other children but I couldn’t move or see. Then a little while ago I felt someone grab me. It was very wet and very cold and I could move… and I was here.” 

“Okay. You did good,” John assured the boy. “You did really good, okay? I’m really proud of you, the rangers are going to be really proud of you when they get here, and your parents are going to be so incredibly happy when they see you that they’ll probably cry. Listen, Mario. Can you tell me anything else? Anything you might have heard? Or felt? Or smelled?” 

The boy shook his head. “Only that it smelled… like an old basement down there. Gross, and wet. And… and I couldn’t stop. I didn’t want to go when I heard the music, but I couldn’t stop myself. I couldn’t.” He started to cry, turning into John’s chest and sobbing uncontrollably. The veteran held him and let him cry himself to sleep. It was a normal reaction, a healthy reaction. The cry-out would do him good.

John had been a medic in Vietnam. He couldn’t see anything wrong with the boy – physically – other than malnutrition and shock. He held the boy closer to keep him warm and waited for the helicopter he could hear in the distance. When it landed he was glad to accept the ride back to headquarters with the boy, who was clinging to him for dear life anyway. It was hardly his first chopper flight after all, although Leeson turned a little green.

The police became involved even as the boy was rushed to the hospital. This was where having a local partner was helpful, because while John would have been suspect number one even with the boy’s corroborating statement Leeson had local connections who could back up his timeline, and of course he could back up John’s. The police drove them back to their car, and they got take out and went back to the hotel to debrief and consult with Taurus. 

Their faceless, nameless computer genius had apparently already heard some of their exploits because there was an email waiting in John’s in box when they got to the motel. “I see you found one of the missing kids,” he said. “Congratulations.”

“He let him go,” John admitted. He related the kid’s story to his contact. “I think it was meant to keep us off its trail.” 

“Makes sense,” came the reply. “Fill the park with cops and rangers, make it harder for hunters to do their jobs. The compulsion kind of gives me a clue as to what we might be dealing with. Ever dealt with faerie magic before?” 

“Come again?” John frowned. “You been messing around in San Francisco again?”

“How very funny and homophobic of you, Winchester. We’re talking stuff that’s a lot older than most of what we know about demons and witchcraft, and it’s pretty tricky to fight. If I’m right – and I need more research before I’m even sure that I am – its lair won’t even be in Kelly Lake. Of course we could be dealing with a very powerful water spirit, but that would surprise me. It’s pattern of going around and stealing children from different communities that don’t share a common water supply makes that unlikely. And it could be some kind of pagan god, in which case we’re still dealing with something that might well be unkillable.” 

“So what are we supposed to do about it?” John retorted. “Sit on our thumbs?” 

“If that’s what gets you off,” came the response. “If you have any leads on fighting the fae, tracking their lairs, finding where they hoard the children they take or figuring out what kind of pagan god this could be by all means follow up. All I ask is that you let me know what you find so the next time someone asks me I have an answer for them; you have a bad track record when it comes to answering people. Your case is hardly the only thing on my plate right now, Winchester. There’s that whole pukwudgie thing, or did you forget about Dean? I’ll let you know if I find anything.”

John punched a wall. The cheap fake-art print hanging over the desk fell down, shattering the glass. “Self-righteous son of a bitch.” 

Leeson poured them both whiskeys from his flask. “Hey. We got one kid back. Whether or not the Pied Piper or whatever let us have him or not, I’d count that as a win.”

“Yeah. Yeah, that kid’s alive and he could have died. He’d have died of exposure if we hadn’t come across him. “ He lifted his cup to his partner, who toasted him. “At least we’ve got that.” Still, Taurus’ words rankled. “You know much about this guy, Leeson?” he asked, steepling his fingers in front of his face and staring at the computer screen.

“Who, Taurus? I know he knows his stuff.” 

“Yeah, but how? And who is he, really? He’s not a hunter, but he’s killed for the hunt before. Or so I’m told. He knows the life but no one knows who he is. He’s got this real attitude about me… about hunting, really, or so it seems.”

“He’s never said anything to anyone I know about hunting in general,” the other man avowed. “Never. I mean, I guess he’s probably…”

“Probably what?” John said, turning to him.

“Well, he’s turned down jobs before.”

“Hunters don’t turn down jobs, Mac. It’s one of the first things I learned when I got into this business. It doesn’t matter if it’s not what you’d usually be hunting, a hunter never turns down a job. People’s lives depend on it.”

“Well, he says himself that he ain’t a hunter, don’t he?” Leeson smiled gently. “He ain’t like us. But… he thinks about the jobs he’ll take. Like… when my buddy got turned into a cat. He was willing to help find out how to turn him back, no problem. He wasn’t willing to help take out the witch who did it, because Billy couldn’t prove to him that she was a danger to other people before she turned him into a cat.” 

“She was a witch. Of course she was a danger to other people.” John looked at him out of the corner of his eye. “What the hell, man?” 

“Well, that was Billy’s way of looking at it. He’d heard of this witch up in the hills who was able to do some pretty wild things – never did nothing to nobody who didn’t hurt her first, or at least not so’s I heard about it, but Billy could never abide witches. He heard about her curing someone of something, I think it was cancer, and went and checked her out. Legit witchcraft all right. Way too powerful for him, and way too smart for him too. It wouldn’t have been hard for her to kill him. It wouldn’t have been hard for her to turn him out to fend for himself either, you know? But instead she boxed him up special and shipped him to me, all nice and special-care. Someone like that was just defending herself, you know?” 

“She’s still a witch. She still needs to be hunted down,” John insisted.

“Well, I can see where you’re coming from, John. I really can. But Taurus? He ain’t going to be the one to help you find her. And Billy ain’t either, I can tell you that. He knows he got off easy and he ain’t going to go pestering innocent women who ain’t doing no one no harm.” The Californian shook his head and took a drink of his whiskey. “There’s other stories like that too, you know. Things like… oh, if he finds out that a wood spirit is harmless he’ll stop working on a case. I heard once that a hunter reached out to him about a vengeful spirit in an apartment building near Stanford. He said it sounded like something else. Two days later the activity just stopped. The guy asked Taurus about it and he said he took care of it ‘peacefully,’ whatever that means.” He shrugged. “He sounds like an all right guy, honestly. If he were willing to meet face to face I’d love to buy him a beer, hear what he’s all about.” 

“I’m sure.” John sneered. “He sounds like he’s got a lot of the same ideas my youngest had.”

“This the same one Taurus says you’re hunting?”

Damn it. “I’m not hunting him…” 

“Yet.” He smiled gently. “You think your boy’s gone dark side or something?” 

“I don’t know.” He sighed. “He… this is family stuff. But he… he knew his job, he knew his place, he knew his mission and he just wouldn’t accept them. Decided he was too good for hunting. Too good for the only life he’d ever known. And he’s always had certain… ways about him, you know?” He shook his head. “He always had this idea of morality. He wouldn’t have wanted to hunt the witch either. He’d probably have asked her all sorts of questions though. Before he was a sophomore in high school not only had he read the entire ‘Clavicula Solomonis’ he’d made parts of it work, and while it was what we needed at the time that’s never sat quite right with me.”

“So you came out to California to see if you could look in on him, see what he was up to,” his companion surmised with a chuckle. “Only to find the gates slammed in your face.”

“Told them I’d put him in fear!” he said indignantly. His cup of whiskey had miraculously emptied itself. He refilled it, and Leeson’s too. “He had the gall to say I made him fear for his life.”

“John, hunters are pretty much serial killers with a very specialized clientele,” the other man pointed out. 

“Granted, granted. But if the university did a search of his room I’m pretty sure they’d find things that would turn their hair white.” 

“Maybe. Unless he’d been trained in how to hide such things.” 

John couldn’t help but snicker. “At least he’d have learned something from me.” He paused. “What about you, any kids?”

“Nah. Never could get a girl to stick around long enough.” 

John sighed. “You’re lucky. Kids, man. One way or another, they just break your heart.”

*Dean * 

Dean felt like crap – moldy crap. His joints burned, his head throbbed and his stomach rebelled if he even thought about food. He’d followed the instructions that Taurus had sent him and drank the gak that resulted – tea from poisoned porcupine needles? Seriously? Who did that? The stuff had been among the foulest stuff he’d ever tasted and Dean had tasted some pretty foul stuff in his day. His feet had stopped turning black though. What he wanted to know was how the guy – a man he’d never actually met – had the first idea that he was in any way poisoned by the pukwudgie. Because really, that was how Dean had found out. He’d found the stupid needles, felt like crap, felt worse, gone to bed, woke up, noticed that his feet were turning black, turned on his computer, noticed the incoming mail from Taurus and followed the instructions. Now his feet were no longer black and he felt marginally less crappy, but he still felt terrible. “Hey. Thanks for the cure. How did you know I’d been poisoned, anyway? And how long will I be sick?” 

The reply came back within half an hour. “You’ll be sick for a while. The potion arrested the lethality, buying time for me to figure out a cure. It’s going to be a cleansing ritual, I know that much. Basically you’ve attracted a specific pukwudgie. I need to figure out exactly what you’re going to need to do to buy your freedom, okay? You’re going to need to be kind of patient. Enjoy yourself, I upgraded your Busty Asian Beauties membership.”

Dean frowned. “How did you know I even had an account?”

“Very good at what I do, Dean. Also, remember who my friends are. Relax. I’ll only use my powers for good. Think of it as an enforced vacation. I upgraded your cable package too; you should be getting all of the channels.”

He sighed. “Thanks man. I appreciate your help. I still don’t know how you knew that I’d been dinged in the first place, though. I mean, you’re a hacker, right?” 

“Not just a hacker.” The replies came quickly, like the guy was actually hanging around and waiting for his message. “I’ve got other skills. And to be honest, someone around here was beside himself with worry when he found out that you were going into Freetown, okay? He knew what was there and what might happen and asked me to keep an eye out.” 

Dean thought about it. “Are you a witch?” 

“What? No. I’m just a guy. A guy who happens to know a thing or two about what’s in Freetown, okay?” 

“Was it Sammy who asked you to keep an eye on me?” 

The response took a good five minutes this time. “He was scared, Dean. He knew that we were in contact. I told him I wouldn’t carry any messages.” 

Dean frowned. On the one hand, this guy had been monitoring him in Freetown via supernatural means – which their father would expressly forbid and would probably punish severely – at Sammy’s behest. On the other hand, Sammy cared enough about him to be worried about what he was doing. Not enough to have his back, not enough to stick by him, not enough to fight by his side, but enough to have some guy spy on him with a crystal ball or something. And, frankly, that had saved his life. “Well, that’s good. Because I’d hate to have to ask you to tell him he was right this once. It would go to his head and everything,” he typed.

“I’m pretty sure there’s no danger of that,” Taurus wrote back. “But I know you’re not speaking to him, so I won’t pass the message on. I’ll let you know when I know what the next step is.” 

“It’s not like that,” Dean found himself typing. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was the fever. Maybe it was the fear that this stranger was judging him by his attitude toward his little brother. Maybe it was his fear that the stranger’s judgment was right. “It’s just… my dad needs to know he can trust me.”

“I’m pretty sure he knows, Dean.”

He had no response to that – what could he say, really? He flipped on the remote. True to Taurus’ word, all of the channels were indeed on. All of them, to include the ones that charged by the show and carried an age limit. He settled into an ethnographic exploration of taboo mating ritual practices and sport, falling asleep halfway through the first scene and before the second cheerleader even dropped her pom-poms. When he woke up he had a new email from Taurus. “Okay. I’ve got the first part of the cleansing ritual; I’m pretty sure you’re not going to be overly enthusiastic about it but it shouldn’t be too strenuous. Tomorrow morning, just as the sun rises, you need to go to Massasoit State Park and wash yourself in Lake Rico.” 

“Pardon?” It was one word, but Dean felt too bleary-eyed to really say more. 

“Stark naked. Don’t bother bringing soap, you’ll just piss him off. Use the sand at the bottom of the lake to scrub yourself. Go out far enough that your shoulders are covered. Dunk yourself three times – completely underwater, no half-assing it – and then go back to your apartment. You’ll get further instructions after that.” 

“Are you serious?” Dean rubbed at his face and wished he hadn’t. “Because this sounds like a dumb fraternity prank.” 

“No, that was last week, when a chemistry professor’s entire lectern was disassembled and put back together with toothpicks. It held just fine – until he put his lecture notes onto it. Pukwudgies are tricksters, Dean. Be prepared for that. They’re not trying to drive home a lesson – at least most aren’t – they’re just kind of mean for the sake of being mean. But you still need to do this to get through to your cure. If you don’t, you’ll feel like this – achy, sick and useless – for the rest of your life.”

Dean sighed. “Okay. The sun’s first light will find my naked ass floating in Lake Rico, wherever that is.” “Okay. Feel better, Dean.” “Hey – is Sam okay?” 

The reply took a moment. “He’s worried as hell about you and could live without your dad hunting him. He misses you. Wishes you were here. Wishes he could hear your voice. But otherwise yeah. He’s okay.”

Dean set an alarm and went back to sleep. When the alarm went off he rolled painfully out of bed, lurched down to the Impala and drove up to the state park in question in the dark. Technically it was illegal for him to be there and indeed the park gate was closed, so he parked on a side street and hiked in. Not that hiking in the cold and dark was any picnic of course, not in his condition. Here he was, Dean Winchester, hunter extraordinaire, and he was wheezing on a flat road heading into a state park. He had to stop to retch a couple of times but Taurus’ warning kept him going. If he didn’t do this he’d never get better. 

Not, of course, that he hadn’t planned. He was sick. Not stupid. Taurus had warned him that pukwudgies were tricksters, right? This one wanted to see him skinny-dipping in a cold lake. He carefully hid one change of clothing in a tree. He’d left another in the Impala. The clothes on his back he carefully folded and stashed in a tree by the side of the lake as he approached it, looking warily around himself as he forced his way into the frigid waters. Damn but that was cold! Fortunately he was alone; he didn’t think he could face this in the company of women, to be honest. 

By the time the water engulfed his knees his teeth clattered together and his arms wrapped themselves around his chest, purely of their own volition. He pushed on. Eventually he made it to shoulder height, where he ducked himself under to reach the sand with which to scrub himself. That counted as once, right? He wasn’t sure. After scrubbing himself perfunctorily he dunked himself three more times, just to make sure that the terms were satisfied. Of course his first suit of clothes were missing when he got out. Damn pukwudgie. 

He jogged back to the second suit. His lips had to be blue, he knew it. His lungs gasped for air and his hands trembled but at least he managed to run, which had to be progress, right? The clothes were there. Of course they weren’t just there. The jeans had been fused carefully shut – not just stitched but woven, as though they’d been purchased defective. The shirt had been shrunk to the size of a child’s. “Fuck,” he growled.

Well, there was nothing else for it. He tied the legs of the jeans around himself to cover his most personal parts and tucked the shirt into the back to cover his ass. The last thing he needed right now was a public indecency arrest on top of everything else. He didn’t run back to the Impala – that would involve too much flapping – but his stride was rapid as he made his way back to Baby. One middle-aged woman out walking her dog saw him. “Prank, huh?” she surmised, looking him up and down. Oddly, he didn’t feel like he was about to be devoured.

“Yeah,” he admitted, looking at the ground. “I kind of expected something like this, to be honest.” 

“Make sure you get them back good,” she advised. “A man could catch his death out here.” 

“I probably deserved it,” he admitted. 

She shrugged. “That’s all right, then.” The dog gave him a lick and they went their own way – possibly back to the very woods he’d come from. 

“Careful in those woods, ma’am,” he called out. “There are some strange types in there right about now. You might want to give them a wide berth.”

She gave him an appraising look, tilting her head to the side. “Fair enough,” she grinned. “When the naked guy says other people are strange, I’ll give a listen.” They continued on their way. 

He made it to the car. The clothes inside were untouched. So was the towel. He dressed himself quickly with the car running so it would heat up faster and he still shivered all the way back to the crappy rental. Thank God the heat was working there, because his teeth hadn’t stopped chattering since he’d gotten into the water. He turned the water as hot as his skin could stand and stood under it until the hot water ran out, not even for prurient reasons.

When he got out he was still cold, although less so. He fixed himself a can of soup – a grocery standby since their early childhood – and grabbed all of the blankets from his father’s bed, bringing them to his couch. He detailed his adventures to Taurus before falling asleep in a warm little cocoon. 

He woke several hours later. He could have slept for another ten hours, but the bone-deep chill had left him. So, remarkably, had the headache. He still ached, but the fire in every joint had died down to embers. The Californian had emailed him back, not once but twice. “I hope none of those clothes were particularly important to you,” he said. “Nice move, though, with the impromptu modesty panel. Impressive.” 

“Winchesters are good at avoiding jail,” he retorted before moving on to the second message. 

“It looks like you get to rest for at least the rest of the day, probably tomorrow too. I’d expect to sleep a lot, in fact. That’s okay and perfectly normal under the circumstances. Your body could probably use it. I’d avoid sleeping pills or excessive alcohol consumption though – dreams will be very important when you’re sleeping right now, and you’re going to need to be able to think on your feet. The pukwudgie may attempt to communicate with you. He’s very intelligent and very cunning. He’s smarter than you. He’s smarter than your dad. That’s not an insult. He’s not human, Dean. Be very careful.” 

Dean sighed. Great. An evil kewpie doll trickster figure with superhuman intelligence might or might not try to talk to him in his dreams and he couldn’t call the smartest person he knew for help. Fantastic. “Anything I should avoid talking about with him?” 

“Pukwudgies hate humanity,” Taurus reminded him. “They don’t like giants either. I’d avoid the kewpie doll jokes.” 

“Thanks. He turned on the television and let it lull him to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no experience with pukwudgie poison, but legend does say that their darts are poisoned. 
> 
> Massasoit Park is real. Lake Rico is real. If you try to go skinny-dipping in Lake Rico at dawn or at any other time of day you are very likely to be arrested. So don't do it, unless it's absolutely necessary for curing pukwudgie poison. Legal disclaimer over.


	5. Look Out Your Window And I'll Be Gone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam gets some much-needed help. John has an encounter. Dean goes on a pilgrimage.

*Sam * 

Sam stayed up all night waiting for Dean to tell him that he’d gotten through the cleansing ritual okay. It meant that his morning workout had to slide a bit but he didn’t care. He couldn’t rest until he knew Dean was safer. It was okay, it was Thursday. He could make the workout up after class or something; his class schedule was otherwise empty until his two o’clock chem lab and it wasn’t like he was likely to feel much like eating when things were so up in the air with Dean. Since classes were in good shape – thank God for insomnia and insanely good preparation ahead of time – he was able to go to the library and get some work done on the Pied Piper case once he’d worked off some of his anxiety. 

Pied Piper. Who would have seriously thought that there would even be anything to the old story, anyway? Well, of course there was. People didn’t just make things up. Well, they did, but it was just fiction. Good stories but not the kind of stuff that stretched across generations and pushed the little button in the dinosaur brain marked “primal fear.” The kid’s story – assuming that little Mario was a reliable narrator – indicated that water was involved somehow. Well, that made sense. The earliest Pied Piper stories all involved the stolen children being drowned in the river. Only Mario hadn’t drowned. He’d come close though. He’d been released from someplace underwater and swum to the surface, then dragged himself to the shore before passing out from exhaustion if news stories were at all believable. So… the thing’s lair was underground, under the lake. Or more probably underground and accessible via any of the lakes. 

It had released Mario, there was no doubting that. Even John Winchester, who could admit no one’s opinion to hold value if it hadn’t been his opinion first, had acknowledged that to be fact. Maybe it was in the water table itself – a valuable creature in California. Was a water table spirit even possible? He’d considered demon, but he rejected demon again. The kids were alive. Mario had said so. What the Piper was keeping them alive for was another matter entirely but right now he had to consider the symptom, not the implications long-term. Changelings kept their victims alive for a while. He’d never taken one on but he’d heard of them. The reasons for keeping the stolen children alive had never been made particularly clear, probably because most hunters were more interested in slaughter than study. They were cousins to the fae, right? Maybe? And this compulsion thing bore some resemblance to the kind of magic the fae were reputed to use. Dad had reported that Mario had known he shouldn’t follow the music and he hadn’t wanted to follow the music but he was unable to stop himself.

There was, fortunately, a book on faerie lore deep within the bowels of the library. He set an alarm on his phone and buried himself in it for a while, and then signed it out when he needed to get away to class. After his lab he ran into Meli. “You look like crap,” she told him. “Did you go to sleep at all last night?” 

“Uh, no?” he admitted sheepishly. The RA fixed him with her best “stern doctor” glare. “Look, Dean got whammied by a pukwudgie and I’m trying to help cure him. The first step of his cure was today and I was worried about him.”

She blinked. “What’s a pukwudgie?” 

He sighed. Maybe Stan should branch out. More people outside of Southeastern Massachusetts should really know what a pukwudgie could do. “It’s a kind of trickster figure from Cape Cod and the Southeastern Massachusetts area. They’re rare, but they’re nasty. They’re not the kind of benevolent tricksters that are trying to play tricks on you to teach you a lesson. I guess you could say that they’re… quasi-demonic? Maybe? I don’t know. I’ve only really talked to one.”

“One quasi-demonic trickster figure.” 

“Yeah. I know how it sounds but it’s not like that, Meli. He’s not like that, he’s helping me to try to figure out how to make Dean better –“

“Woah, slow down there, Secretariat. Are we talking about the same big brother who cut you loose? And just stood by and let your dad bust up your face and break your ribs?”

“Yeah.” He inhaled and exhaled. “That doesn’t mean I want him to die.”

“Okay. So… what can I do to help?” 

Impulsively, the first-year threw his arms around the diminutive senior. “That’s… that’s good, actually. That’s helpful. God, you’ve done so much already.” 

“Well, it’s not like you saved my life with that witch or anything.” She smiled. “You’re still doing that… research for hunters, aren’t you?”

He sighed. “Yeah. But listen – it gives me an ear into the community. It lets me know if anyone is onto me,” he added a little desperately when he saw her face, “or onto you.” Bingo, he added at her little start. “I know you’re still practicing, at least as much as you can under the circumstances. I mean, there’s only so much you can do in a college dorm room, right? Anyway, this way I’m more likely to hear about anything that involves anyone at Stanford. And I get to decide what cases I take. If I hear about a case that I don’t like, I can turn it down and warn the person involved that they’ve been noticed.”

“Are you working on a case right now?”

“A couple, actually. There are these glyphs up in Montana that no one has managed to figure out; it’s kind of on the back burner. There’s the Dean thing, but that’s personal. And then believe it or not I’m actually working on one with my dad. Not that he knows it’s me.”

“That has got to be the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” she accused, stepping away from him with her hands on her hips. “He’s going to figure it out eventually, Sam. He’s a hunter. That’s what he does.” 

“Maybe. I’m not talking to them on the phone or meeting with them face to face. I’m strictly providing research support. You saw the report on the news the other day, about that little boy that was found up in the state park?” She nodded. “He’s part of it. There’s a bunch more missing kids, and I know damn well that this isn’t something Dad’s faced before. I don’t know if this is something anyone’s faced before. And it’s stealing children.” 

She looked at him long and hard for a moment, and then she sighed. “All right. Well, what do you need me to do?”

“What do you mean?” He blinked.

“Well, I’m not about to let you flunk out of Stanford on behalf of an ass like John Winchester. I’m in. I’m helping you research. When I can, just like for you it’s when you can. You’re working a job, carrying an over-full courseload and trying to save your brother’s life. I’m in.” 

He could have kissed her. Well, Meli would be easy to kiss anyway, as a general rule, but that was beside the point. “Grab your laptop and bring it by and I’ll show you.” She had her laptop in his room within five minutes of their arrival on their floor. He explained about the music and about Mario’s story, then detailed his Pied Piper theory. “It’s kind of what I’m going with. I’ve set up a search algorithm to kind of trawl for a pattern of drowning clusters; now I’m going to set one up on your machine that searches for clusters of missing children and broken promises.”

She snorted. “The bedrock of this country is broken promises.” 

He considered. He wanted to object, because he actually liked a lot of things about his country but she had a very good point and he knew it. “Valid,” he admitted. “Very valid. Should give us a pretty decent sample size then, right? So if it’s naturally occurring, we’ll see that it popped up in other places when other contracts or treaties or promises were broken and we should be able to figure out what got it to stop. In the meantime, were you here over the summer or did you go home?”

She shook her head. “I was back in New Orleans.”

“Okay. Well, that should run in the background for a little while. While it’s doing its thing, why don’t you do a search for broken contracts in this area… let’s say in the month of August? If we can narrow down the cause we might be able to figure out if someone summoned it or if it’s native to the area or what.” He pulled the book out of his backpack. “I’m going to try to figure out what to do about it.” 

She shook her head. “I see that look, Winchester. You skipped lunch, didn’t you.” She didn’t even voice it as a question and he had to accept it, just hanging his head. “And I saw you at breakfast. You stirred your yogurt. I don’t think you actually ingested anything but coffee. You’re a genius, Sam. We both know it. But you don’t have the sense God gave a goat when it comes to taking care of yourself. How are you going to help anyone if you’re passed out from dehydration and hunger? And honestly, with all the people coming in and out of this room all night long don’t any of them want to stop and take care of you once in a while?” 

He gave a pathetic little grin. “I’m a Winchester, Meli. We don’t really get taken care of.” 

She shook her head. “You were a Winchester, Sam. There are some benefits to being cut out of that, you know. Come on. I’m putting together a crew to go to dinner and don’t think for a minute that I won’t be watching to see if you eat.” She grabbed his hand. “I know people are waiting for this information but they can keep waiting while you take care of yourself.”

She grabbed his hand and pulled him out into the hallway, knocking on doors until she had a good cluster of eight people to escort her charge down to dinner. He knew that it was necessary. No, his father almost certainly wasn’t on campus right now but he might come back. He needed to keep himself safe and he knew it. But he also hated the loss of privacy. Fortunately there were plenty of willing and eager neighbors willing to basically become human shields for him. They made their way to the dining hall. Sam tried to stick to salad but between Meli and Brady there was no getting away without something more substantial. He found himself forced to actually eat it too, or at least most of it. He barely paid attention to what it even was; some kind of pasta and chicken and some kind of creamy sauce. He was graciously permitted some salad to round it out though. 

After dinner he and Meli retreated to his room to finish the research. The nationwide search had yielded very little in the way of useful information. There had been one other similar cluster of disappearances and broken treaties and contracts. That had been ugly. Native people had been blamed for the disappearances and had been subjected to brutal reprisals. Even Sam had known about that particular part of Nebraska. The ghosts of the slain still haunted the land there, and even John Winchester thought twice about bringing his sons on jobs in that part of the world while they were young. He’d had no idea that it might be related to something like this, of course. No trace of the missing settler children had ever been found and no one had ever documented whether Native children had gone missing or not, but when Sam did a little more digging he found that one settler family had entered into a contract with another family for a herd of cattle and felt that they had been cheated just before the disappearances began. There was no indication as to what might have caused the disappearances to stop, unless it was perhaps the slaughter of the natives in the reprisals after the broken treaty that uprooted them from their homes. The missing children were never heard from again, although in that pre-digital age there would be no way to trace them through facial identification or fingerprinting.

Sam emailed the results to Leeson, focusing on his own book. As near as he could tell, the fae preferred first-borns. For the most part that seemed to fit pattern although at least one of the children involved was second-born. Did that necessarily mean that this thing was not in fact fae? Or was it possible that it had been summoned? According to this book fae of both courts – apparently there were two – could be summoned and bound to a caster who knew the correct rituals. They could be invited in by the unwitting as well, breaking free and wreaking havoc as they willed. Or they could just break on through if conditions were right. If this thing were fae. That was a mighty big if. He sent a message to both hunters, loath as he was to contact John Winchester again. “This is important,” he told them. “I need to know if you noticed any of the following while you were at Coe State Park: stones placed in a circle in any kind of ritualistic fashion, stone outcroppings that seemed to have grown in any kind of circular pattern or worn in any kind of circular way, circles of trees, circles of plants of any kind, mushroom circles, unusual symbols carved on trees, anything out of the ordinary.” 

“Find anything good?” Meli wanted to know when she heard him typing.

“Meh. Some possible signs. If the thing is under a compulsion itself it won’t help much but it’ll help me nail it down, you know?” He bit his lip. “I wonder if Stan would know anything?”

“’Stan?’”

“The pukwudgie helping to cure Dean. I’m kind of reluctant to owe a pukwudgie more than I absolutely have to, and he’s not going to be keen on helping humans anyway, you know? So maybe I should just skip asking him.” He rubbed at his face.

“The pukwudgie’s name is Stan?” she questioned. 

“How well do you speak Wampanoag?” 

“Uh…” 

“Same here. I tried to pronounce his actual name when we met. When he stopped laughing he told me to just call him Stan.” He shrugged. “I tried.” 

“I thought my life was weird, man.” 

He huffed a little. “Yeah. Well, not anymore. It’s purely normal from here on out, you know? Straight As and a law degree, house and job and car and dog and everything. No more weird stuff. No more hunting. No more… no more witches in the middle of the night, unless they’re nice and want to have tea or something.” She laughed. “Not even normal, Meli. Safe. I’m only even working this case because it gets my father out of California faster.” 

“Mmm. Nothing to do with the missing kids then.” 

He sighed. “Well, I mean, it’s not that I don’t want to help the missing kids. I totally do. It’s just… I’m not looking for missing kids to help. There are already people doing that. It doesn’t have to be me, you know? It’s not like I’m some kind of… chosen one or something like that. I’m no one’s savior, I don’t have some kind of divine mission or something idiotic like that. I’m just Sam Freaking Winchester.” 

She turned to face him. “Do you ever think that it might be kind of late for normal, Sam?”

He’d already looked back down at his book but now he looked sharply back up at her. “What are you talking about?” 

“Well, I mean, straight As are hardly normal for one thing. They’re a hell of an achievement. It’s your first semester and all but you’re maintaining them against a pretty full schedule and an awful lot of stress right now. And even though you’re trying not to be involved with your old life it’s still there.”

“I’m keeping a hand in to keep myself safe,” he reminded her, closing the book and leaning forward. “To keep us both safe.”

“I know. I know you are. But… aren’t you maybe also trying to still do good? Maybe a little bit?” She smiled. “You’re helping people, Sam. And that’s…. that’s okay. But what you’re doing isn’t exactly normal, it’s just what you know how to do. When you could be out there making use of some of your God-given talents,” she grinned slyly.

“What are you talking about?”

“My God, man. Half of the girls on this floor are just pining over you and the things you do to them.” He felt his skin go scarlet. “You know how to please a woman, Sam. Or so I’m given to understand. But you don’t let any of them take care of you. Why is that?” 

“Meli, that’s… “ 

“It’s a simple enough question, Sam.”

He hung his head, letting his hair flop over his face. “Because they really aren’t interested,” he admitted. 

She was still for a moment. “Really.”

“Well, yeah. I mean, sure, they’re willing enough to come by for a night or whatever. And that’s great – it’s fun, and if that makes them happy I’m certainly willing to oblige. And I’m not really sure what else there even really is, because my dad sure as hell wasn’t going to let me date while I was under his roof – roofs – and I’m pretty sure my brother would spell ‘monogamy’ with four letters.”

“So you want a committed relationship?” she hazarded. 

“How would I know? I’ve never even seen one.” He stood up. “Anyway. Assuming that it’s fae AND we find it AND we kill it, if it’s been summoned we won’t solve the ultimate problem – figuring out who the summoner was and taking away their ability to summon more of the creatures. To get at that we need motivation. That’s why we’re looking for broken contracts.” 

She shook her head and laughed at him. “You’re not going to talk about this then?” 

He laughed. “I’m a Winchester. We don’t talk about our feelings.”

“I told you before, getting cut out gets you some benefits.” 

“Oh, yeah. I’m not drowning them in alcohol or in misdirected outbursts of violence. Compared to that, I’d say avoidance is probably the healthiest option, wouldn’t you?” 

*John *

Once he got back to his motel room John opened up a bottle, put his feet up and started drinking. Maybe that was stupid. He was, after all, technically on the job. What if something happened in the middle of the night and he needed to go out and deal with it? At the same time, seeing that poor kid had brought back all sorts of memories, and memory was a large part of the impetus behind his drinking after all. He was man enough to admit that. Having that boy holding on for dear life, even in the chopper, was enough to make him feel twenty years younger again. Or twenty years older. He could remember a time when Dean had clung to him just as tightly, about a thousand years ago. Before life had gone to crap, when the worst thing in the world was a toilet training accident (he’d had a few of those, hadn’t he?) or an exceptionally loud thunderstorm. And Dean had clung to him tight, so tight, because Daddy could make anything better. 

Sam had never done that. Even in infancy he hadn’t done that. He’d clung to Dean even before the world had ended, and after that night he’d clung to Dean even harder. John had tried… well, he’d tried to bond with Sammy, right? Of course he had. It just never took. Alien eyes, solemn even over jars of pureed peas, stared back at him over nearly two decades. 

Adam – well, he’d never had the chance with Adam. His mother had stolen the chance from him, but he could hardly blame her for doing so. She hadn’t even known about his two older sons, and what kind of life could he have given the boy? Would Kate have possibly welcomed an extra two boys, already half grown and one of them a soldier blooded already? For the sake of a man she’d known for three days? Fortunately his incoming mail jolted him out of his rum-soaked reverie. 

He read the missive from Taurus, self-righteous and interfering and enigmatic. “Mushroom circles?” he read out loud. “What is this, the Smurfs?” he typed back, hitting “Reply All.” “You doing anything about my boy there Geek Squad?” he added privately. He poured himself another drink. Ten minutes later his laptop screen changed to an image of two men engaged in a sex act and froze. John cursed and rebooted, but the image remained and nothing worked. 

Ten minutes after that John’s phone rang. “Well that was effective,” Leeson commented. “I don’t know what he did, or what you did, but Taurus said to let you know that he’ll fix your laptop after the case is finished and when you’re back at Pastor Jim’s house. Not one minute before. Look, John, I know Taurus rubs you the wrong way but you can’t go pissing off the only guy who seems to be able to help us.” 

“We don’t need his help,” John snarled back, slamming the screen down with a little more force than necessary. “I did just fine without him for close to nineteen years.”

“Dealt with any fae before?” his partner wanted to know. 

“We don’t know that it is fae.”

“That’s true. That’s why he was asking us that question. Now we can try to be respectful adults about this and maybe bring some more kids home alive or we can be dicks and maybe not bring these kids home alive and probably get ourselves killed too.” 

He sighed. “I’m sorry, Mac. It’s just… that boy today… he reminded me of my son…” 

“The one you’re hunting?” 

“No. No, Mac. The good one.” He sighed. “All right. No, I didn’t notice anything weird about that particular part of the park.” He glanced at the clock. “Listen, I’m going to call Dean and check on him. I’ll be all right for tomorrow. What do you say we head back out to the park tomorrow and see if we can find any more clues? Any of those formations like your buddy was talking about? That might be able to help us.”

“Sounds good. I’ll let Taurus know. And John?”

“Yeah?” 

“Stay off campus.”

“I will.” 

He ended the call and stared at the phone for a moment, then he dialed Dean. His son’s voice was thick with sleep when he answered. “Dad?” he grunted. 

“Were you sleeping, boy?” he wanted to know. 

“Yeah – yes, sir.”

“I thought Taurus gave you some kind of cure,” he challenged.

“It’s a process, sir. He’s getting the cure in dribs and drabs, I’m not sure how. I took the first part of the process today. I’m sleeping it off.” 

“Was it bad?” He envisioned the boy being made to drink all kinds of toxins. It seemed to be the sort of thing that would be right up Taurus’ alley. “What was in it?”

“Water, sir. And no, it was just chilly. Very very chilly.” The kid sounded absolutely wrecked and not in the good way. “’M eating soup and sleeping a lot. Seems to be helping.” 

“Has Taurus given you any indication about how he knows all this crap about pukwudgies anyway?”

“No sir. Like I said before, he told me he used to live around here. He probably learned it then.”

“I don’t like it,” he told his son. “I think he’s probably a little too buddy buddy with your brother.” 

“I know he is, sir. But he’s not getting involved, he’s not carrying messages or anything. He’s more willing to help because of S – because of him, because he wants him to be comfortable about us. Where we are, that we’re okay, that kind of thing. But he helps other people, Dad. Ask Pastor Jim.” 

“He’s got an awful attitude toward me, that’s for sure.” 

“Maybe… he doesn’t understand about you, sir. I mean, you did shut down campus. I mean, I know you had your reasons and I trust you,” Dean hastened to add. “Whatever reason you had – have – for hunting Sammy – shit I’m sorry –“ 

“Is that what you think I was doing, Dean? Hunting your brother?” 

His weary sigh was audible even at a distance. “Sir, I think that whatever you were doing is what you thought best at the time. If you decided he needed to be hunted then he needed to be hunted. I trust you. You’ll tell me what I need to know when I need to know it.”

John drank deeply then. “I wasn’t hunting him, Dean. I was concerned. I wanted to make sure he wasn’t caught up in anything. But apparently he’d… he’d… he’d said some things to the school and gotten me banned from campus, so I had to sneak in and break into his dorm and he caught me and called the cops on me.”

“He WHAT?” Dean’s outrage wasn’t false, and shouting like that sent him into a coughing fit. “If I ever see him again I’m going to kick his ass for you.” 

“Maybe if you’d done a better job of kicking his ass when he was younger we wouldn’t be in this predicament now.” He probably wouldn’t have said that if he hadn’t made such deep inroads on that bottle of rum, but the words were out now. They weren’t any less true for having come from liquid courage either. Although maybe all the harsh discipline in the world wouldn’t have helped with Sam. Maybe the kid was just born bad. 

“I know, sir.”

“Nothing we can do about it now, Dean.” It wasn’t like it was reasonable to put that much responsibility on a kid as young as Dean had been either. Like he’d said, nothing he could do about it now. “He should’ve been there to have your back. Pukwudgie wouldn’t have gotten you if someone had been watching your back.”

“Maybe, sir.” 

“You should go to sleep, boy. That poison is still in you.” What the hell was the kid doing on the phone? He was sick! 

“Yes, sir.” Dean didn’t hang up though, he waited for his father to terminate the call. He was a good son.

That call hadn’t gone as planned either. It occurred to the hunter that he might want to limit his phone time to occasions when he hadn’t started drinking. It didn’t stop him from helping to lighten the bottle a little more before going to bed. 

The next morning he met up with Leeson comparatively early. They picked up some provisions – not that John wasn’t perfectly capable of feeding himself off the land, no, not him – and they headed up into the park. The rangers had a strong presence, supplemented by state police and county sheriffs. Apparently plenty of people believed that they would still find kids in the area, although the search area was restricted to the Kelly Lake area and divers had been brought in. “Taurus doesn’t think that Kelly Lake is the lair,” the local man told him as they set out, as soon as they were sure they weren’t being followed. Each hunter carried a backpack with a bedroll. Fortunately the forecast included no rain at all, which was unfortunate for the risk of fire and for farmers but was great for anyone who might be hiking in the area. “He thinks that the Piper – whatever it might be – was probably trying to throw us off the trail or distract us.” 

“We were heading up to Coit Lake when we found him and I’m pretty sure that the trail map showed alternate routes to get there.” John snorted. “Should we make that our destination this time out?” They agreed. The Winchester privately felt a little ridiculous sticking to marked trails – he was a Winchester, he didn’t do rules or trails or crap like that – but they were just scouting right now, weren’t they? It would be best if they could have decent reference points to aim their research at when they went back to town. “Did he have any more leads on what this thing is?” he asked. 

“Not yet. He says he’s brought in some research help. Didn’t say who though. I gave him my cell number just in case he needs to get in touch with us while we’re out here. You never know what you’re going to find, you know?” He shrugged.

“So you’ve worked with this guy before then?” he asked, more to make conversation. 

“It’s like I told you, he helped a buddy of mine out with a problem. I haven’t got a problem with a guy who does research, John. Someone’s got to do it. Not everyone’s cut out for it. Like me, for example. If someone else wants to do the bookwork while I do the legwork I figure I can do twice as much good, you know? He gets to help probably three times as many people as he would if he were hunting himself.”

“But he never has to get his hands dirty,” John objected. “He never has to face danger himself, do his own stitches in the middle of the night in a motel bathroom.”

“Why would you want that for another human being, John?” He pointed at a tree. “What do you think that is?” 

The Midwesterner looked. “It kind of looks like… runes? Norse runes?”

“Could be.” He pulled out a digital camera and started snapping pictures. “It might not mean anything of course. I mean, lots of perfectly normal, non-supernatural people have an interest in Viking culture and runes and all that stuff.” 

“In California?” 

“Oh, sure. There’s a whole society around it. Anyway, might as well document it. You want to make a note on the map?” John drew a “one” at their approximate location on the trail map. “Anyway, why would you want the whole violent lifestyle for someone who doesn’t want it and who isn’t suited to it?”

“What do you mean isn’t suited to it?” he scoffed. They kept moving down the trail. “Who the hell isn’t suited to it? You do the job that’s in front of you and you get over it. That’s all.”

Leeson chuckled. “Not so much, John. Some guys can’t handle it. They can’t handle the violence. They can’t handle the fact that they can’t save everyone, you know? It makes ‘em… it takes them harder.”

“They just need to toughen up.” He watched some kind of snake slither into the brush. “Every time one of my boys used to complain about any of that crap I’d make them take on more. It’s the only way to work through that kind of thinking.”

“Well, it certainly worked with Dean.” 

John paused. “You saying something about how I raised Sam, Leeson?” 

The Californian stopped. “Who, me? No. How could I? I mean, I’ve never met the kid. But who knows what Taurus’ deal is, man? Maybe he can’t hunt, did you think about that? Maybe he’s not physically able. And do you know what else? All this time I’ve been on this case I’ve only been working on one case. I know Taurus has been working on at least five. There’s my buddy with the feline problem. There’s this case. There’s the one with your son and the pukwudgie issue. There’s the glyphs up in Montana that he’s working on – that’s not exactly an emergency, but I know Jim Murphy asked him to take a look at them. And there’s that thing up in Oregon with the Cybele and Attis cult that he solved in what – a day? So I’d say he’s doing pretty well.” He held up a hand. “Do you hear something?” 

“Besides your passionate defense of Max Headroom’s bastard son?” He paused. “No. I don’t hear anything,” he admitted after a moment. “Not a damn thing.” No birds. No rustling leaves. No slitherings in the underbrush or skitterings in the branches. The air around them had become perfectly still. The men looked at each other. 

A single note pierced the air. Oboe, John identified with a strangely detached part of his hindbrain as his body began to run. He turned and ran without any conscious control over his actions, back down the trail from which he’d come. Leeson followed and passed him, a sheen of sweat breaking out over his face as his body pushed itself to its limits. John was fast, and he knew it. He just had never run quite this fast, nor on quite such uneven ground. Leeson tripped. “I think I broke my ankle!” he yelled, going down in a heap. John tripped over him, falling onto his face. His body didn’t seem to be bothered by the brief interruption, even though he heard a crack when he landed. His wrist was at least fractured if not fully broken. 

At another sound from the oboe his body jerked itself upright and began running again. Leeson wasn’t far behind, screaming on his broken ankle. The only thing John could control was his mouth and he did, remaining perfectly silent until he was in the truck with Leeson beside him in the passenger seat. Thank God he’d had to drive with a broken wrist before; he knew how to do it. Leeson dialed his phone as John put the car into drive, heart thundering in his chest. “What the hell was that?” he asked his companion. 

“I wish I knew – oh God this hurts,” he sobbed. “Is this Taurus? Browning, huh? Okay. This is Mac Leeson. We just had an encounter – hiking up in Coe State Park again looking for clues when we heard this oboe sound. Yeah, two notes.” There was a pause and John could hear the vague sounds of a woman’s voice repeating the words. “Something took over our bodies, made us run. No control at all. We both broke bones and couldn’t stop from running, I broke my ankle and couldn’t stop myself from running.” There was the pause again, while the woman – “Browning” – repeated the words. “Okay. Thanks.” He turned to John. “That was his associate. Calls herself –“ 

“Browning, I know. Are they all using gun aliases now?” 

“I figured it was a zodiac alias until we spoke to her. Anyway, she says Taurus said to go get our bones casted up and set and everything. Also that I should stay with you until the case is over.”

John looked at him. “With me? Why the hell?” 

“Dunno. I guess we’ll find out.” He sighed and John actually felt guilty. His partner’s face was actually gray with pain. “The nearest clinic equipped to handle this kind of thing is just down this road here.” It took several hours for them to get their bones set and dealt with. 

By the time they got back to John’s room, complete with painkillers and Chinese takeout, John noticed that some additions had been made. Rust-brown powder had been left in addition to the salt lines across all the entrances and iron horseshoes hung up over the air conditioning vents. Soap had been used to make complex-looking runes in the window and two packs of industrial-use earplugs had been left on the beds. There was no sign of forced entry. Leeson checked his messages. “Taurus says to enjoy our Chinese food.”

*Dean * 

Dean lay back on the cushions when his father called him. Dad hadn’t accounted for the time difference. Or maybe he had and just hadn’t really cared. Time zones hadn’t ever really mattered to them before. After all, a hunter should be ready and available at all hours of the day and night, right? And he would have no idea what Dean was feeling like. Plus, a hunter like John – like Dean was supposed to be, not that he’d ever really lived up to it – should really be able to deal with a little sickness. It wasn’t like he’d never been sick before. 

Dad had been drinking. It was okay – the guy deserved it after all. He worked hard, risking his life for everyone and raising two kids besides. He hadn’t said anything that wasn’t true. Well, maybe. On the one hand, he’d obviously gone wrong somewhere with Sammy, because the kid had gone off the rails somewhere. Sure he’d raised a kid that had managed to get a full-ride scholarship to a top-tier school while changing schools every six weeks or so. That would be great for most families but the Winchesters weren’t most families. They were a unit. Sammy had a place in the unit and he’d deserted his post, which meant that Dean had raised the kind of person who could just walk away from his post. And now people were going to die because of it. People were going to die because Dean had somehow managed to completely avoid giving Sammy any values whatsoever.

But had a lack of discipline really been the culprit? Dean wasn’t entirely sure. Sometimes he thought the opposite might have been true. He’d been pretty quick to come down on the kid for all kinds of things, and it wasn’t like the kid had many outlets. Not like Dean had. There had been perfectly valid reasons for it – there were things after the kid, after all, and hunters for crying out loud. Dean had killed a man when he’d been only twelve, just to protect the boy, but it’s not like anyone had ever explained that to Sammy. No, he’d just gone and read Dad’s journal (like he wasn’t supposed to) and found out for himself. So unlike Dean who’d been able to go to arcades or to the park or whatever or out on dates, Sam had been expected to stay indoors or to be accompanied by his father or brother at all times. There had never been any opportunity for release, for simple play, to get away from the watchful eye of authority and cut loose. No wonder the kid was such a pill. But shouldn’t that have nipped any rebelliousness in the bud? Well, it hadn’t. He’d fought everything that had anything whatsoever to do with hunting, but especially if it involved Dad. If it had just been him and Sam it was much easier – unless Dean was enforcing an order from Dad and Sam found out. Which he would, eventually. 

He flipped on the television. Having all of the channels was nice. It was a luxury he knew his father would refuse on general principles – “Can’t get too attached to crap like that, boys,” he’d shake his head. “It makes you soft. It makes you weak.” Still, if he was going to be stuck inside and sick it was awesome to be able to flip through hundreds of channels of nothing. And frankly there wasn’t anyone to complain or razz him about what he watched, either. If he wanted to watch six straight hours of Venezuelan soap operas he could do that, and if he wanted to marathon documentaries about the engineering marvels of the Roman Empire he could do that too. Right now he was enjoying a different sort of classically themed piece, although he was sick enough that it really was mostly for aesthetic value and because he could. 

He picked up his laptop. There was a quick message from Taurus, just a note to see how he was doing. He smiled. It was nice to know that someone cared. A few slugs of whiskey sent him back to sleep, wrapped back up in his blanket cocoon on the couch with the television running. He started dreaming pretty quickly. He’d always dreamed, of course. Not like Sammy, for whom nightmares were pretty much the norm and who had never, ever gotten a full night’s sleep without a great deal of chemical assistance in his entire life. Dean had the occasional nightmare of course – what hunter didn’t? – but his subconscious usually preferred to soothe him rather than fray his nerves further. Tonight was different. 

Tonight he woke up in a damp, steamy underground cave that smelled vaguely of rotten eggs. He sat on a stone that was formed vaguely like a chair near a pool of what looked like lava, right across from the pukwudgie. Well, he assumed it was the pukwudgie. It was a pukwudgie anyway – it looked like what he’d glimpsed in his mirror. “Hi there, Dean,” the thing greeted him. Its voice was deep and masculine, and it wore clothes that it had cobbled together from what looked like old flannel and maybe porcupine quills. “I thought it was time that we met in person. Sort of.” 

He looked around. “I’m dreaming.”

“Nothing gets by you, does it?” 

“Where are we?”

“This? It’s… well, it’s Hell, Dean.” 

He sprang back. “You’re a demon?” 

“No, dumbass. Do a little research, would you? Geez, for all the appreciation you people showed to your little brother you sure relied on him for a lot of your thinking, didn’t you?” He shook his head. “There was a time – back before your ancestors even really thought bathing might be something to bring back – when we were just regular trickster figures, you know? Plain, boring tricksters. Just desserts, funny little pranks, but harmless. We didn’t have anything against humanity. That changed after the fight with Maushop’s sons. Now we hate humanity, which more or less gives us common cause with the demons. That doesn’t make us demonic ourselves. For example – holy water? Not going to work. Exorcisms? Likewise completely useless. But it’s convenient to us to work within your Abrahamic framework for now. Something’s coming, something exciting, and we want to make sure we’re on the right side.”

“Does this have anything to do with what killed my mother?” Dean demanded, standing up. 

The pukwudgie gestured, and he found himself seated again. “No. And don’t get ahead of yourself. This isn’t your space. It isn’t mine either, but the person who owns it is feeling generous. He owes me a favor, and that favor is you.” The creature grinned nastily. “I would have killed you outright if you hadn’t smelled like someone I knew. Now. The next step in your cure will take place tomorrow. You’re going to go to the Mount Blue Spring at Wompatuck State Park with two empty vessels. You’re going to fill those vessels with water from the spring and you’re going to drink the vessels dry. Here’s the catch.” 

“There’s always a catch,” Dean sneered. 

“Well, yeah. Quasi-demonic trickster figure here, Dean. Try to keep up. You have to park your car at the visitor center parking lot and walk to the spring. Then you have to walk back.”

“That’s all?”

“No. You have to take your first drink at precisely noon. You have to walk in barefoot and walk out barefoot. And no matter what, you can’t speak a single word to another human being or accept help from them. No rides. No towels. No blankets. No spare socks from the ranger. And your vow of silence begins as soon as you wake up.”

“Am I allowed to type or write?” he wanted to know.

“Sure. Send messages to your boyfriend in California.” The monster giggled, and if that wasn’t more disturbing than the prospect of this entire conversation then he didn’t know what was. “Do you understand what you need to do, Dean?” 

“I do.”

“Good.” 

Dean woke with a start, no longer cold. In fact, he wondered if he’d ever feel cold again. Had that really been Hell? No, of course not. No one traipsed off to Hell in their dreams, that was just stupid. Taurus had told him that the pukwudgie might try to communicate with him via his dreams, though, so clearly something had happened. 

He glanced at the clock. Nine-thirty. Well, if the traffic gods were with him – never a sure thing this close to Boston but whatever – he could probably make it in time. And if he had any doubts about the veracity of the pukwudgie’s visit, two empty rum jugs had been cleaned and left on the counter after being removed from the recycling bin. He dressed and packed, making sure that the medical kit was prepared, and drove north. 

He hadn’t been to Wompatuck yet, hadn’t really heard much about the place. It was a decent-sized state park, and he was able to pick up a map that would lead him to the spring. It would be easy as anything to drive right up to the site – apparently all kinds of people did that every day, filled up jug after jug with water from the spring and went away again – but that wasn’t the point here. The point was for him to hoof it. And in his condition that wasn’t going to be easy. He stripped off his socks and shoes and started walking. A two mile hike – more or less – shouldn’t be that much of a problem even in bare feet. Of course who knew what was on the ground around here. There were dogs all over the place. There was broken glass. There were bits of car – really? Were there really accidents often enough for him to be stepping on little shards of Fiero by the side of the road in a freaking state park? This place was a decent size but it wasn’t exactly Freetown. 

And it was quiet. People saw him, and their dogs were plenty friendly. It was when their humans saw that he was wandering around without shoes on so close to Halloween – there had been a frost only this morning – that they drew back. Half an hour in a park ranger pulled up in a pickup truck. “Hi, buddy,” the guy said to him in a wary tone. 

Dean waved. 

“Is everything okay?” 

The hunter nodded, and then he coughed a horrible wet hacking cough.

“You don’t look so hot,” the official told him carefully. “Can I give you a ride somewhere?” 

Dean shook his head. 

The man frowned. “Can’t talk?” 

Dean sighed. He wished Sammy were here. Sammy would have already thought of something to say to this guy. Something about the monks of ancient Ireland and how they’d crawl a thousand miles on their hands and knees for penance or something - He brightened and pointed to his mouth. With one hand, he made a “zippering” gesture. He heroically avoided making it lewd – that was trouble he didn’t need, however tempting it might be. Then he raised his eyes heavenward and crossed himself slowly and with great exaggeration. 

The ranger’s eyebrows drew together. “You’ve taken a vow of silence. For religious reasons.”

Dean nodded and pointed to his feet, shuffled them a little. It hurt, but he hung his head in a caricature of sorrow.

“It’s your penance?” the man guessed, chuckling. “Man, I don’t even want to know what church you go to, but I so don’t want to go to confession there. Good luck, friend.”

If every joint in Dean’s body hadn’t been aching he’d have laughed once the vehicle was out of sight. Nice thinking, Sammy, he thought with pride. You really got us out of that one. 

He really would have loved to hear Sam’s voice right now. Of course, he suspected he knew what his brother would say. It would probably start with how he wouldn’t even be in this mess if he hadn’t been out trying to win Dad’s approval by going after a creature he knew he wasn’t equipped to handle. He’d been warned. Taurus had warned him, and even Dad had thought to tell him to be careful. There had been plenty of other things in Massachusetts to hunt; he didn’t need to go after this. But for some reason this one had been willing to let him suffer his way back to life – why was that? What was it about him that had the pukwudgie so willing to make an exception? 

But Sam’s voice wouldn’t stop. Of course it was Dad’s approval that he was seeking, because he was Dad’s good little soldier. He could complain about Sammy leaving and not having his back and he’d be right, but hadn’t Dad done the same thing? Sure Dad had his reasons – he was off doing whatever in California – but he still didn’t trust Dean, still didn’t need Dean. Hadn’t Dean earned that trust? He’d let the most important person in his world just walk away without him, and the guy’s friend was there insisting that he missed him and wished he’d gone with him and wanted him. All for Dad, who’d just walked away from him like it was nothing.

But he and Dad, they’d be together again. Right? Of course right. Dad wasn’t here because he didn’t need to be. He had faith that Dean could handle this, whatever this was. He knew that Dean was capable of dealing with his pukwudgie problem. He didn’t need Dean, but Dean was perfectly well able to get along on his own too. 

He trudged his way to the spring, having had to dodge three oblivious cars and two overly enthusiastic Golden Retrievers on the way. His feet were covered in scratches, small pebbles and the scrapings of dog mess that he couldn’t avoid, but here he stood, in the line. The other patrons – mostly soccer moms in minivans – stood back. He knew he looked terrible. He hadn’t shaved since he got whammied and his hair was best described as “bed head.” What did he care? No one he knew was even here. He would never see any of these people again. When he got to the tap he pulled his cleaned-up rum bottles out of his bag – amid much sneering from the assembled church ladies of Hingham – and filled them. Then he stood to the side, still within the spring precinct but not impeding anyone, and drank. And drank. And drank. He paused, wiped his mouth and he drank some more. How exactly was he supposed to do this? People were staring. He paused for breath again. He wasn’t thirsty. He wasn’t even close to being thirsty. Still, he closed his eyes and forced the rest of the water down. One bottle down. The next one was even harder than the first. He had to pause for a good five minutes about a quarter of the way through, feeling like he was going to vomit. Was it possible to get sick from too much water? It wasn’t like he had much else in his system – a little soup, a little whiskey and that was it. This should be good for him, right? It was supposed to save his life. Then why did he feel like he was drowning with each gulp? It took half an hour but he finished the second bottle. He put the empty bottles back into his bag and began the long walk back to his car. 

This took even longer than the way in. His head swam. His vision blurred, and about a mile in he actually had to vomit into the drainage ditch. Oh God. Had he just squandered away his chance to be cured? Was he going to be sick for the rest of his life now? Was he going to have to repeat this step until he got it right? He wasn’t sure which was worse? He staggered back up the ditch, now spattered in filth. His insides cramped something fierce and his head throbbed. Maybe the stupid pukwudgie had lied. Maybe he was going to die anyway – they were evil little bastards anyway, right? Getting back to the car took forever, and he was trembling so badly by the time he got there that he could barely get the key into the lock. He put his socks and shoes on, and grabbed a towel out of the back to mop himself up as best he could. Then he drove himself back to the apartment, only sheer force of will keeping him from making a mess of the Impala.

Once home he trashed the bathroom thoroughly, then took the longest shower the hot water heater would allow. Cleaner and thoroughly empty of everything, he curled back up on the couch shaking and miserable. Six hours later someone knocked on the door. He answered it. It was a deliveryman, with six bowls of soup. “A guy named Taurus sent them,” the guy explained in a bored tone. “Paid by credit card. Called from California.” Dean tipped the guy anyway and refrigerated five of the soups. He brought the other one over to the couch and sat it down. Surprisingly, he felt better. Not well, but significantly better than he had when he’d left for Wompatuck that morning. “Thanks, man.” 

The reply came back immediately. “Don’t mention it. I wish I could do more.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mount Blue Spring exists, and you can actually go fill up your own personal jugs or whatever with water from the spring. I haven't done so myself. I am completely unaware of any mystical properties attributed to the spring. However, I know that dogs are not allowed near it by order of the department of health.


	6. You're The Reason I'm Traveling On

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam makes some progress. John can't sit still. Dean looks at a rock.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for mention of sexual abuse of young children. Nothing explicit, but this may be triggering for some readers. If it is, skip the "Sam" section or skip this chapter. 
> 
> Also, a certain character will use some homophobic language. This language does not reflect the views of the author in any way, but some readers may find it distressing. (It was distressing to write.)

*Sam * 

Sam got up and re-filled his coffee cup. He’d managed to get in and out of his father’s crappy motel room – and it was truly one of the crappiest motel rooms that he’d ever encountered in a lifetime of crappy motels – without detection. Hopefully his measures would be enough to counter anything the Piper might decide to do or at least to keep them off the thing’s radar. And of course they would go off and go poking around in the damn park when they didn’t know what it was or how to kill it or stop it or trap it or fight it. Of course they would. They were hunters. It was kind of what they did, right? The one guy – Leeson – he’d broken his ankle. One toot from an oboe and the guy had gotten up and gone for a run on a damn broken ankle. That was going to have some long-term effects and no mistake. 

So whatever held the thing’s power this oboe was absolutely a part of it. He glanced at the screen. Fifteen contracts that met the parameters he’d set – it didn’t sound like much. Still, who was to say that this thing had even been summoned? Who was to say that he wasn’t just chasing his tail here looking up articles about people pissing and moaning about water rights or grazing rights or a fence two inches to the damn left of where it was supposed to be when his idiot father and his father’s mildly less idiotic friend were out there busting their bones doing their best to get themselves killed? 

He pushed his chair back, took a deep breath and exhaled. Getting all worked up wasn’t going to help anyone. It especially wasn’t going to help the missing kids, who were the whole reason he was doing this in the first place. He sighed. Okay. Odds were that someone had summoned it, because the last time something like this had been seen it had just… gone away. Either a hunter had gotten to it – in which case Pastor Jim or Bobby Singer would have heard of it, both options having been ruled out already – or it had been released back to where it had come from. Or, he thought, it had turned on its creator and gone off to do its own thing. Who knew what child-stealing water-dwelling monsters from vaguely Germanic folklore did for their own thing? 

Breathe, he reminded himself, and drank some more coffee. So. Finding the summoner increased the odds that he’d be able to figure out how to get rid of the thing. He dashed off an email to Pastor Jim to be on the safe side and dove into the articles about the broken contracts. This should be right up his alley, right? Exactly the kind of thing he’d be doing if he would up working at a law firm. Only now he was looking for people likely to be angry enough to summoning creatures… 

Right. That was why he’d set up the search parameters the way he had in the first place, because he was pretty sure that however much that big brewery from back east might want that spring for a new factory a big corporate brewery wasn’t really likely to get involved with the summoning of much of anything. The start-up microbrewery idled by a dispute with the state, on the other hand, losing thousands of dollars a day – now that was something to consider. 

The next contract involved a day care center and the company responsible for background checks. Apparently someone had gotten through the background check and the day care center – like the brewery, idled – was suing for all sorts of things to include loss of reputation and income and legal fees and restitution to the families of the victims. He winced at the sight. No need for bad memories to be brought up again, thank you very much. It was a possibility and certainly explained the connection to children, although not the reason that water was involved. Still, it was worth considering. 

There were three failed real estate transactions. None of them seemed like a big enough deal to really involve dark forces, but what did Sam know about it? He wasn’t exactly the kind of guy to involve the forces of evil for much. Even when it came to achieving his greatest goal – getting the hell away from Dad – he’d done it with his own raw intellect and willpower, even though he knew there were other options available. He’d revisit those cases if he didn’t have more luck with the more promising cases. 

Next came a mining case – did people still mine this close to Palo Alto? Seriously? Apparently they did, and when they did they got hurt. The mining company was suing a subcontractor for walking off the job due to unsafe conditions. Huh. Okay. Well, again, corporations were usually pretty light on the black magic. Next came two minor cases – domestic help, really. No one was going to use black magic over the maid not showing up for work. Seriously, Sam had met some seriously screwed up people in his life and no one was that shallow. Violence sure. Not black magic. 

There were a few home repair cases that did involve some significant damage, those might be promising but not enough to really reach out and take kids from all over the community. That suggested a much larger beef, something that reached out to the region or the state.

After looking at the whole caseload he narrowed it down to three: the brewers, the day-care people and a communally owned organic farm that had been eminent-domained in a shady deal by their community. He stretched. It was late. It was late and he was exhausted, not having slept at all the night before out of concern for Dean. He typed out an email to Leeson, not feeling even remotely sorry about the virus he’d unleashed on his father’s laptop. “Narrowed down possible summoners,” he told them. “Three suspects.” 

“Have Dean narrow it down further if you can’t do it,” came the response. “He’s sitting around useless in Fall River right now. – JW.”

Sam grabbed a pillow and shouted a curse into it. “It’s one in the morning here, meaning it’s four in the morning there. Dean’s sick. He should be feeling a bit better but he needs his rest. The poison is still firmly in charge,” he typed. His father had been a freaking medic. Didn’t he know this kind of thing? “Besides, research is not Dean’s strong suit or so I hear. He’s more suited to field work.”

“I’ll call him and tell him to do it myself,” Dad informed him. 

“Like typing with one hand do you?” he shot back. “You’re not setting him to any research without more information, and apparently I have to withhold it from you for Dean’s own good.” How does it feel, he thought viciously. 

“Screw you.” 

“You’re a little old for my tastes. If you’re really lonely I’m sure there are some lovely folk up in San Francisco who would be happy to accommodate you; depending on what you’re looking for of course I could ask around and see where you should go.” 

He glanced at the relevant information about the brewery people. Getting the information about the owners wasn’t difficult, and they didn’t have more than five employees. It was hard to say that anyone “looked” like the type to have a whole lot of interest in spellcasting. What they did have was a lot of money tied up in the venture. The two owners didn’t exactly have an exorbitant lifestyle; they lived together in a small apartment. Getting any kind of privacy to do any kind of spellcasting would be a challenge. The employees had no ownership stake in the company. Unlike the actual owners, while they were certainly inconvenienced by the shuttering of the company they weren’t losing everything by it. 

The day care company was another matter. As the hours stretched he looked into the backgrounds of everyone involved on both sides – the day care owners and workers as well as the people running the background check company. The day care owners seemed to be okay people – college friends, Stanford alums actually. They’d majored in Early Childhood Education and decided to open a top-notch facility. They’d done pretty well for themselves too, hiring a company to help with background checks as the organization grew. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing; a lot of companies did that, even day cares. The only problem was that they’d hired a company owned by one of the owners’ sisters to do the checks. That company was fraught with problems and had been for quite some time. Apparently this time around they just hadn’t bothered to do the checks. For years. 

For years and years the day care people hadn’t caught on because there were no problems that anyone was aware of – until there were. One teacher began molesting students. It turned out that she was a known offender from Oregon, and if the background check had actually been done she’d have been caught. She hadn’t until one of the students complained to her mother, who believed her and listened. It turned out that the teacher had been very active in her five months’ employment, attacking six students.

Neither of the owners seemed like the spellcasting type – again, it was possible but if they were going to summon dark forces now wouldn’t they have done so in the past? But the parents – wasn’t there an implied breach of contract in sending your kid off to day care when you thought the teachers were checked and safe? As the sun rose Sam hacked into the court system’s database. It was tricky work and his eyes were barely staying open but the adrenaline coursed through his veins. Part of him felt kind of sick for doing this – there was a good reason to keep this sort of thing private, after all. At the same time, it could well save lives. There might be no actual danger to the missing kids. Then again, he was pretty sure that a supernatural creature summoned against its will to follow the bidding of a lesser being wasn’t exactly likely to be sympathetic to the needs of some little kid either.

Most of the parents had occupations that generally excluded the right mindset for magic or spellcasting. Maybe he was stereotyping, but bankers usually weren’t into ritual summonings. They didn’t need to be and their acumen ended to be tailored to more mundane pursuits. Same with doctors. Cops were never witches, not ever. 

Lawyers? Huh. 

But he didn’t need to go poking at the lawyers, because he found a better candidate much closer to home. One little girl had a father, Bryan Perez, who was right here on campus. A professor of folklore, in fact. Sam quickly looked up the professor’s Stanford biography. Apparently the guy was fairly well known in certain circles. He knew quite a lot about fairy tales, for example. He’d published quite a lot of papers and even a few books about kernels of truth in old tales, to include a fairly recent collection of works on the Pied Piper and similar stories. In fact, Sam had come across one of the articles in his initial research. How had he freaking missed it? He re-read the article, and several more, only stopping when Brady and Harris came to drag him off to breakfast. “Come on, Winchester. Time for food,” Harris insisted.

Brady frowned. “When’s the last time you slept?” he demanded. 

“Uh…” Sam replied intelligently.

His friends exchanged knowing looks. “Man, you are crap at this whole taking care of yourself like a grown man thing,” Harris shook his head. “All right. No coffee at breakfast, and you’re going down for a nap when you’re done. No ands, ifs, or buts, Winchester. Your notes already made it to the mock trial team. I’ll tell them you were sick today, you know they weren’t going to let a frosh speak anyway.” 

“But –“

“Soccer season’s over anyway,” Brady reminded him. He grabbed both of Sam’s phones – his real phone and the burner phone he’d been using for Taurus – and pushed them into Sam’s pockets. If there was an extra little caress there, well, Harris didn’t notice. “Come on. “ 

Both men grabbed an arm and literally dragged Sam out into the hall and toward the elevators. Sam obediently grabbed some fruit and poked at it with his fork. Every time Brady glared he ate a piece, even though he could barely taste it through the fatigue. Once his friends were done with their food, though, he’d only gotten through maybe a quarter of it and they had to be content with leading him back to his room. He sent a quick email to Leeson – “Pretty sure it’s fae, pretty positive it’s summoned, have a suspect, need to investigate, do not go into the park.” Then his friends tucked him into bed in a downright Dean-like gesture, turned the phones right off and sat down to do their own schoolwork. “Are you actually guarding me?” he asked.

“Damn straight,” Harris retorted. “If it’s the only way to get that beanpole ass of yours to sleep then yeah.”

“If we don’t you’re just going to get up and get back to work,” Brady pointed out accurately. 

Sam frowned and hunkered down. “‘S not that much of a beanpole ass,” he objected before letting the fatigue wash over him and take him under. 

He woke up four hours later with a start. Brady and Harris were gone, replaced by Meli. “Good morning sunshine,” she greeted, getting up from his desk. “I see you’ve decided to rejoin the land of the living. How goes it?” 

He rubbed his eyes. “I can’t believe I slept that long.”

“I can’t believe Brady and Harris had to intervene,” she scolded. “Sam, you’re supposed to be out of hunting, not killing yourself for your father when he doesn’t even know it’s you. Have you forgotten that whole wants to kill you thing? Because I haven’t.”

“No. No, I haven’t.” He sighed. “I think I’ve got it, though. I mean, I think I know who it is. Who summoned it. And he works here on campus.”

Her face fell. “You’re going to kill another Stanford person?” she whispered, tears in her eyes. 

His heart froze. She’d never see him as anything but a killer. “No, Meli. Not unless I have to. Look.” He got up and opened up his computer. “Look – read these articles here, here and here.”

She glanced at the articles she indicated. “Okay, so according to these fairy tales it’s possible. But these are just stories!”

“So is ninety-nine percent of what we do, Meli. I had to take out the guy who was using demonic forces to take out pre-med students because he was making himself a slave to demons. This guy… if what he’s writing about here is true… I mean, if I can figure out a way to safely release and banish the piper, we should be able to do this peacefully, right? Without having to fire a single shot.” He smiled at her hopefully, trying to put as much hope and light into his eyes as he could. Dean had always called it the Puppy Dog Eyes. They’d gotten away with a lot through the power of the Puppy Dog Eyes. “I really, really don’t want to have to kill anyone. That’s the whole point of being at Stanford, really.”

“So you’re going to go talk to him?” 

He sighed. “I was hoping to do a little reconnaissance first.” 

She reached into a take-out container on his desk. “First pizza. Then recon.”

He rolled his eyes. “Brady and Harris are tattle-tales.” He took a bite of the pizza.

After eating he checked his messages. Leeson told him that they’d received the message. John had also sent a message somehow informing him that people were dying while he took his sweet time about things. Meli shook her head. “Your dad’s a dick,” she pointed out. 

“Valid,” he admitted, because it was. “But he’s the one who has to go find those kids. His partner busted an ankle, remember?” He stood up. “Do you want to come with?” He sent another message, this one to Dean. “Checking in,” he told him. “How you feeling?”

“I don’t know,” she retorted. “Does this involve breaking and entering?”

“Probably. Lying and conning if not.” 

“You do pick the best dates, Sam Winchester.”

*John *

John let the painkillers do their thing for a while – HBO was marathoning the Indiana Jones trilogy and they had nothing from freaking Taurus in the meantime. He shouldn’t be so pissy about the guy – he’d apparently found their hotel room and warded it somehow, not that he’d left any kind of note saying how or with what or how he’d learned what to do or anything like that. Leeson – who was in significantly worse shape, having run however many miles on a broken ankle – barely even noticed. He was going to be on the happy pills for quite a while. They’d wanted to send him on to the hospital and do surgeries and everything, and for once John agreed. They had been able to clean it up arthroscopically and everything, not as well as they would have if he’d gone to a proper hospital, but at least he wouldn’t lose the leg. Still, he’d never be able to be as fast as he would have if he’d done things properly.

He exchanged pissy emails via Leeson’s Blackberry with Taurus. Later, when his mind was clearer, he would admit that he’d been inappropriate to begin with. He’d sent out orders to the guy like he was one of John’s sons, like he was part of John’s army. And the guy had been more cognizant of Dean’s needs than John himself had, a better father to Dean than he was. The exchange did give him some clues about the guy though. “You’re a little old for my tastes,” Taurus had told him when he’d come back with the amazingly biting reply of “Screw you.” “Do you think he’s queer?” he asked Leeson. 

“Who?” the local slurred.

“Taurus. Look at this whole note.”

“He’s winding you up, man. And you left yourself open to it. Besides, who cares if he is? Does who he sleeps with have anything to do with how he does his research?”

“That kind of thing doesn’t belong on the battlefield, Mac.” He’d told his sons that a long time ago, and he meant it. It could get you a dishonorable discharge back in his day. Or worse. You needed to be able to trust the guy at your back. 

“It’s California, John. We’re close to San Francisco. You don’t really think everyone’s straight around here, do you?” 

He shook his head. “He said I was too old for his tastes. What if he’s into kids?”

Leeson blinked at him. “Are you for real? Have you been living under a rock, Winchester? There’s a world of difference between not being into a guy who’s old enough to have two grown sons and being into children. You don’t know how old this Taurus guy is.” 

“If he’s a professor –“ 

“You don’t know that he is. He could be a graduate student. He could be an undergrad. He could be a freaking janitor. You don’t know. I don’t know. I think Jim Murphy knows, but he ain’t telling. You’ve known Jim Murphy for close to twenty years. Do you really think he’d be all cozy with a pedophile?” 

John bit his lip. “I’m just not okay with it, okay?”

The other hunter chuckled. “Sure thing.” He dozed off, still chuckling. He took another dose as the movies wound down and he went to bed. They precluded alcohol but what the hell, they still numbed his brain.

Two notes, that was all it had taken. They hadn’t even been particularly good notes – just a couple of honks from a damn goose-sounding instrument and he’d been off to the races, like some kind of track star. (Sammy had run track in school, hadn’t he? One of those times John hadn’t been around to put a stop to any of that nonsense?) He’d never experienced anything quite like it. He’d tried to stop himself. His mind was perfectly clear and perfectly aware and perfectly unable to stop himself from moving. He’d been able to feel everything – every muscle as it was pushed to and through its limits, the burn in his lungs as they screamed for more oxygen, the agony of his wrist (now improved by two shiny new screws!). The only thing he couldn’t do was control himself. The worst had been that feeling after he’d fallen, tripping over Leeson. It hadn’t been the break in his arm, although that had been bad. It had been the feeling of being drawn up like something was picking him up by his shirt, dangling there until he’d been set down on his feet and then being made to run again. That feeling that he was nothing but a puppet. The firm knowledge that he was not the one in control. That had been the worst torture for him. Somehow in all his years of hunting he’d managed to avoid possession. He knew plenty of people who had experienced possession in various forms. Ghosts could possess a person. Demonic spirits could possess a person. Other kinds of spirits could possess you too. This… this hadn’t been like that. This had been different. This had been him being a doll for someone else and that was all. He hadn’t been a person to whatever had done this. He hadn’t been a man. He’d been a thing, a piece of meat. 

He wanted a shower.

His sleep that night was essentially dreamless. That was the drugs – no matter how much booze he drank the dreams never stayed away entirely. He went out and got some breakfast for himself and Leeson, the drugs having left his system by now. He wouldn’t be taking more of them, not on the hunt. He needed to keep his wits about him and besides – they might come in handy down the road. Winchesters hoarded prescriptions. It was a rule.

At about nine or so they got an email from Taurus. It read like a telegram, completely unlike the guy’s usual wordy paragraphs. The jerk still had nothing concrete of course. He was taking it slow, like there was nothing in the world waiting on the other side. Like this was some kind of academic paper instead of something that had the lives of children in the balance. And then there was that stupid warning at the end – “do not go into the park.” Who the hell did he think he was, to be giving John orders like that? 

He picked up the phone and called Jim. “Hello, John.” His old friend sounded downright pained. “How is your case going?” 

“Slow. Your buddy is taking his time with the research.”

“You remember that he’s trying to help your son, right? The one with the pukwudgie poisoning problem?” The priest sipped from his coffee. John could hear it from there. “He was up all night Thursday night, and if his emails are anything to go by he didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.” 

“Is he a pervert, Jim?” 

Now the Minnesotan spewed his coffee out. “What?” 

“He said I was too old for him. Is he into children?”

“You are too old for him. You’re old enough to be his father, John. What the hell has gotten into you? You need to leave California, John. Something’s affecting your brain. Bursting into your son’s dorm room, trying to kill him –“ 

“I wasn’t trying to kill him.”

“You had a funny way of showing it. Now you’re convinced that the guy whose research saved your behind in Fall River and whose research is saving your son’s life right now is a pedophile why? Because he made a reply to a nasty comment you made and the reply was insufficiently homophobic for your needs? John, you’re my friend and I care about you but you’re really not thinking clearly.”

“I can’t leave. There’s six kids still missing.” Jim was right. He shouldn’t have come. Even just being in California was making him angry. “Once I’ve found them and gotten them to safety I’m leaving.” He chuckled a little. “It looks like I’ll be needing to drop by your place anyway – it seems your buddy Taurus did something to my laptop and he won’t fix it until I come to your house.”

“I guess he wants you as far away from him as you seem to want to be.” 

“I just don’t like working with someone I don’t know, Jim.”

“I know, John. But you do have a certain reputation. Have you thought about the fact that he’s just not willing to let you know him?” 

“Why? Why wouldn’t he be willing to let me know him? If he’s innocent then he’s got nothing to hide.”

“Well, let’s start with the whole hunting thing. He’s not a hunter. You have views about people who know about the supernatural and who don’t hunt. You haven’t been subtle about expressing them. Then there’s the whole thing with you demanding proof that he does the things he says he does, like killing that witch.” 

“I don’t trust him, Jim.” 

“You didn’t trust Sam, either. Look where it got you.”

“Are you seriously blaming me for Sam leaving?”

“Yes. Yes, I am. But this isn’t about Sam. This is about you and Taurus. Bobby Singer probably would have been a good resource for you on this hunt too, and he might have been able to drive down to California to help out but he’s not about to go hauling ass to Palo Alto to dig John Winchester out of a hole. Do you know why, John? Because you alienated him. Rufus Turner? You pissed him off too. Travis Kendrick? Likewise. You don’t have a whole lot of allies. Folks respect the work you do, don’t get me wrong, but they’re not willing to work with you. Taurus is getting to that point and believe me when I tell you that you do not want that.” 

“Are you threatening me, Jim?”

“You’re really trying my patience, John. No, I’m not threatening you. I’m warning you. As your friend. Just… you have a chance here. Please don’t blow it.” He paused. “Now. How is Leeson?”

“He’s busted up pretty bad.” He described events as briefly as possible, then went back inside. 

He called Dean to check on him, hearing about the Mount Blue Spring adventure and the six cartons of soup. “Do you think the guy’s sweet on you?” he wanted to know, suspiciously.

“Dad, the guy’s in freaking California. And no. He’s never met me. He knows Sammy, okay? That’s all.”

“Do you think he’s got a thing for Sam?” 

Dean was quiet for a moment. “Who cares?” he asked. “The kid isn’t part of our lives anymore, remember? He abandoned us. He doesn’t need us. It doesn’t matter if this guy has a crush on him or not, or even if they’ve been screwing since the day he got to Stanford. All right? Sammy’s gone and he isn’t coming back.” The hard tone of his son’s voice startled John. 

“Has… has Sam said anything to you? About… you know…” 

“The kid never said anything to me about liking boys. Never said anything to me about liking girls after I stole his prom date. Who was, for the record, very much a girl and I’m in a position to know.” 

“But I mean, since he went to Stanford.”

“Dad, I don’t talk to the kid. At all. Period. I changed my fucking phone number so he’d stop calling, all right? I have no contact with him. You said he was dead to us. So he’s dead. Just the two of us. Maybe he couldn’t follow orders, sir, but you raised me right and I damn well can. Okay?” 

The older hunter felt cold. “Dean, I –“ He stopped himself. This was what he’d wanted, wasn’t it? Sons who followed orders without question. He’d spoken rashly, in his rage and his impotence and his grief, and this had been the result. Dean would have gotten immeasurable comfort from the sound of his brother’s voice right now, but he wouldn’t reach out. Orders were orders, and Dean had turned out perfect. The perfect little soldier. “Right. Okay. Good. Just checking.”

“Yes, sir.” 

“All right. I’m going to see what I can dig up on my own. We’ll meet up somewhere once you’re cured, all right?” 

“Sir.”

He hung up, disgusted with himself. He’d never intended for Dean to be cut off from his brother. Not completely. That bond between them had been something to behold, something stronger than even the parent/child bond and he’d broken it. 

No – not him. Sam had broken it by leaving. If he’d done his duty and stuck by the family none of this would have been necessary. Dean wouldn’t have been poisoned by some pre-Columbian porcupine thing and John wouldn’t be here cracking up trying to work with some faceless pervert in Palo Alto to try to bring in six missing kids. 

He glanced at the clock. He glanced away. He turned on the television. He turned off the television. If that idiot Taurus hadn’t screwed up his computer he could at least do some of the research himself but no. He had to sit here idle, cooling his heels with a guy who was pretty much a stranger while this Taurus guy controlled everything from his ivory tower. “You’re going to shake your feet right off the bed,” Leeson advised.

John grabbed the park trail map. “Okay, so we know that the thing’s lair is in the park, right?”

“Sure,” the other man agreed. 

“And we know that it got upset right about…” He peered at the paper until he found an identifying mark that gave him some clue as to where they’d been when he’d heard that horrible squawking sound. “Right there-ish, right?” 

“Okay. Yeah, that’s about right.”

“So it wouldn’t have felt the need to act out like that if we hadn’t been close. Otherwise it would just have let us wander around, maybe thrown us another red herring. I really think it has to be up here somewhere.” He pointed at the southwest portion of the map. “I really think that Coit Lake is where it’s at.”

“Didn’t Taurus tell us not to go back into the park?” Leeson sighed.

“I don’t answer to some pansy who hides behind a computer.”

“Can you just… not… with the slurs, man?” The other hunter wiped a hand across his face. “Can you just… not? You don’t know the guy, you’re not gonna know the guy, and who he sleeps with has nothing to do with you. Okay? Anyway, you don’t know what this thing is, so how about you wait to go tearing off after it until you know what it is and how to kill it.” 

He glanced at his gray-faced companion. “Sorry, Mac. I didn’t know it bothered you. Look, I’m just going to go to the library, okay? Poke around and see what I can find. I can’t just sit around waiting for the guy, he doesn’t seem to see it as a priority and if I sit still too long I go nuts.” He quirked a smile. “It’s probably half the reason I’m being such an asshole today.” 

“Well hell then John, go to the library. Sign out a couple of Nancy Drew books while you’re there.” John laughed, at least as much at himself as at the joke, and left. 

The library had a computer. In theory it had a two-hour limit but a few well-placed glowers solved that problem quickly. He got an email to Taurus trying to light a fire under the guy – what was he doing, sleeping on the job? – and started researching fae. Most of what he found was on some pretty shady websites, run by the kind of people who spoke very seriously about The Healing Power Of Rocks and wore angel pins on all their clothing. He figured out pretty quickly that he needed to disable the audio on the computer lest the power of the harp be pushed through tinny speakers and turn all the public library patrons into dope-smoking lunatics or something, but still he managed to find a little bit of information. 

He’d need salt. Well, salt he had. He’d need iron. Consecrated or not didn’t matter, as long as the iron was pure and cold. Well, he had that. And he had earplugs, right? None of the lore he could find on these stupid hippy-dippy websites had anything about enchanted oboes or whatever but they all seemed to be pretty heavily focused on Celtic lore. The Pied Piper was Germanic. 

The library closed at five and even the patented John Winchester Death Glare couldn’t extend his time. He supposed the library ladies probably got that kind of thing a lot, and it wasn’t like he was getting anything new. Damn Sam anyway. He should be here doing this, not John. He could do the research and then have John’s back in the field. Maybe. If he could be bothered to follow orders, which was always an iffy thing. He stopped off to get take-out pasta for him and for Leeson, who proved willing to forgive him for having been an ass earlier. He told the man what he’d found. “Any word from Taurus?” he wanted to know. 

“No, nothing.” He eased himself up on the bed. “It probably isn’t exactly easy to research something that hasn’t been seen in a century and a half, you know?” 

“Doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Those kids are lying around out there in the dark, scared and alone and hungry!” He shook his head. “Does he think this is a game?” They ate their dinners and watched some kind of college football game – it was about the only thing on, and it kept them from having to “debate” Taurus. When John was done with his dinner, though, he stood up. “All right, Leeson. I’m heading out.” 

“Heading out where, John?” 

“Heading out to the park. I can’t sleep knowing those kids are out there.” He grabbed the earplugs. “I’ll be back later.” 

“John, don’t go alone –“ 

The injured man’s words died behind the shutting door.

*Dean * 

When Dad called on Saturday Dean was actually kind of surprised. Dad was supposed to be on a case. What was he doing looking in on Dean? He told him about the miserable trip to the stupid soccer mom spring in Hingham and the six cartons of soup afterward. Then Dad had asked that ridiculous question: “Do you think the guy’s sweet on you?”

What the hell, Dad? Was being in California really turning Dad into a raging homophobe? “Dad, the guy’s in freaking California. And no. He’s never met me. He knows Sammy, okay? That’s all.” He’d always known that John didn’t have a whole lot of patience for that sort of thing but it wasn’t like it was something he spent a lot of time being concerned about. He made his views known but Dean hadn’t exactly given him a lot to be concerned about in that vein and he’d always kept a tight leash on Sammy either way, so… where was this coming from?

“Do you think he’s got a thing for Sam?” 

Okay… that made even less sense. “Who cares?” he asked after a moment. “The kid isn’t part of our lives anymore, remember? He abandoned us. He doesn’t need us. It doesn’t matter if this guy has a crush on him or not, or even if they’ve been screwing since the day he got to Stanford. All right? Sammy’s gone and he isn’t coming back.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. Good lord, he didn’t need this right now. He was starting to feel a little bit better, it was true, but he was still at maybe twenty percent if he had to put a number on it and he so didn’t need this.

“Has… has Sam said anything to you? About… you know…” 

Oh God. This had to be a test. Did he really have to prove his loyalty now? Now with some kind of quasi-demonic creature’s poison running through his veins? “The kid never said anything to me about liking boys. Never said anything to me about liking girls after I stole his prom date. Who was, for the record, very much a girl and I’m in a position to know.” 

“But I mean, since he went to Stanford.”

Oh yeah. Totally a test. “Dad, I don’t talk to the kid. At all. Period. I changed my fucking phone number so he’d stop calling, all right? I have no contact with him. You said he was dead to us. So he’s dead. Just the two of us. Maybe he couldn’t follow orders, sir, but you raised me right and I damn well can. Okay?” And it had hurt like Hell to change that phone number just like it hurt like Hell to not call his brother right now. It would be easy. He had the number. He had it right there in his contact list and it wasn’t like he didn’t bring it to the dial screen five times a day just for the chance to hear that soft smile in the kid’s voice.

“Dean, I –“ And then the old man cut himself off. “Right. Okay. Good. Just checking.”

Of course he was. “Yes, sir.” 

“All right. I’m going to see what I can dig up on my own. We’ll meet up somewhere once you’re cured, all right?” 

Had he solved the case, whatever case it was that he was working on out there? Or did he just not think that Dean would be cured before he finished? “Sir.” 

He waited dutifully for his father to hang up before clicking the red button and terminating from his end. His head sagged back down to his pillow. Whatever John Winchester’s problem was he didn’t want any part of it right now. What the hell did he care who Sammy slept with now? He was gone. Dead, for all intents and purposes. And while he knew that John didn’t have time or patience for that sort of thing, he’d never thought his dad would be such a freak about it. It wasn’t like they were religious or anything. They dealt with evil on a daily basis. He hardly thought that a person’s sleeping partner would be such an issue for the guy if it was outside his own family. Jeez. Whatever. Clearly California was just too much for him. He needed to get back to the Midwest, clear his head. 

As for Dean, he needed to finish up with his cure. Right now, though, he still needed to sleep and re-fuel. The soup Taurus had sent over was a godsend. It was easy to reheat and the place wasn’t half bad either. The soup was some kind of Portuguese thing, with a smoky sausage thing and some kind of kale and seventeen kinds of delicious. He got a message from the guy himself a little after two just to check in and see how he was doing. “I’m fine,” he retorted. “Just a heads up though, my dad thinks you’re screwing my brother.”

He puttered around for a while flipping channels and surfing the Internet. He should be looking for cases but the fatigue made it difficult. He called Pastor Jim and chatted. He called Bobby Singer and chatted some more. He’d always liked Bobby. The guy had taught him to throw a baseball, among other things. He was loyal to Dad, always would be, but he sometimes thought no one loved him as much as Bobby did. He called Brandi, who was horrified to learn that he’d been suffering from the flu for so long. She made some noise about coming over to take care of him but didn’t fight too hard when he demurred. She couldn’t afford to call in sick and they both knew it. She couldn’t catch what he had, but he couldn’t explain that to her. He knew that he’d be leaving soon enough anyway; what was the point in letting her get more attached? In getting more attached to her? 

After a few more hours he got a message back from Taurus. “I’m not screwing your brother.”

“Do you want to be?” Maybe if he could get an answer out of this guy he could set Dad’s clearly fevered mind at rest. 

“I am already way more involved with Winchester family drama than I want to be,” came the response. “You’re a nice enough guy, Dean, but I could live without your dad giving me orders like I’m part of his army. Oh, and getting my whole campus shut down.”

“He has a special charm.”

“So did Manson. Look, I’ve just hit a bit of a snag on the case I’m working on for Gnarly Charlie there. Do me a favor and strongly discourage your dad from doing anything stupid like going into the park, okay? I need to go do something highly illegal.” 

Dean blinked at the screen. “Okay then,” he said aloud. Apparently no one needed Dean… again… 

Except they did. He picked up the phone and called his father back. “Sir,” he said when his father picked up. “What are you doing?” 

“Driving to the state park. Why?” 

“Taurus hit a snag, he says. He didn’t say what but he said he needs to go do something ‘highly illegal.’ I don’t know what that is but he says you shouldn’t go into the park.”

“I’m not taking orders from some… person…. who can’t be bothered to get his hands dirty, Dean. There are six kids hidden somewhere in that park and I need to go find them before it’s too late. He had his chance to find what might be able to help. Now I’m going to do this my way.” 

“Dad –“ He didn’t get a chance to say much more because Dad hung up. “Fuck!” he yelled. The neighbors on the right – the ones who actually had a toddler – pounded on the wall in angry response. He sent a quick email to Taurus with an update, including his phone number so the guy could call him back. This emailing back and forth was getting to be crap. 

His phone rang almost immediately. The caller ID came back with a California area code. “Hello, is this Dean?” The voice belonged to a woman, youngish with a Louisiana accent. “This is Browning. I’m an associate of Taurus’.” 

“Browning, huh?” Browning sounded hot. 

“What exactly did your father say to you?” 

“What’s Taurus doing right now?” he countered. 

“Trying to avoid adding grand theft auto to the impressive list of felonies we’re racking up tonight. Don’t you give me that look, boy. I’m not letting you go in there alone, not the way you’ve been sleeping.”

Dean’s mouth quirked. “So you’re his girlfriend.”

“Sure. Someone has to take care of him while he’s watching out for your family.” He felt guilty. “All right. So what did your father say?” 

“He said that he couldn’t leave the kids missing in the park and he was going in.” 

Browning repeated the words to someone Dean couldn’t hear. A voice Dean couldn’t recognize spoke to someone else, followed by a soft response that sounded almost familiar. Or it would have if it were a little louder, less muffled. “All right. Well, here’s hoping he finds nothing but the trail and doesn’t get lost, I guess,” she sighed, speaking very quietly into the phone. “Look – if we don’t pick up don’t panic, all right? We’re going to have to go do some very delicate negotiating. But Dean – we’re going to do everything we can to make sure that your father is as safe as possible, all right?” She sounded for all the world like every ER doctor he’d ever spoken to.

“Yes, ma’am. Thanks.”

“I can’t believe you talked him out of the car. Those eyes are a superpower,” she said as she closed the phone. 

Eyes? No. It couldn’t be. Plenty of people knew how to use their looks to manipulate. There was no way Sammy was involved – no way he could actually be Taurus. He was done with hunting. He was sure as hell done with the Winchesters. There was no way he’d be helping their dad. No way he’d be helping Dean. 

He flipped channels some more and grabbed a drink. All of this stuff was happening on the other side of the country. He was powerless. No one needed him there. In fact, his father needed him so little that he’d deliberately ditched him specifically so that he wouldn’t have to deal with his lame, slow, sorry self. He’d been useful so long as there was a Sammy to protect and to monitor. He’d done a crappy job of that and now he wasn’t even useful for that anymore.

He eventually fell into a fitful sleep that qualified at least as much for the “drunken stupor” label as it did “sleep.” When dreams finally came he found himself in the pukwudgie’s favorite meeting place again. “Isn’t there anyplace better we could meet?” he asked. “Someplace a little more neutral?”

“Hell is, technically, neutral,” the monster pointed out. “More or less.”

“You’re quasi-demonic, right?”

“Quasi- being the operative prefix.” 

“You sound like Sammy.”

“You sound like you mean that to be an insult.” The pukwudgie grinned, showing nasty, yellow, pointed teeth. “Okay, Dean. Let’s talk about the next stage to your cure.” 

“Lay it on me. After the fraternity prank and the weird water drinking ritual I’m not sure what else you can stick me with.” 

He shook his head. “Aw, Dean, I thought you’d like the religious touch. I took the whole barefoot thing from the Croagh Patrick pilgrimage in Ireland.” He waggled his eyebrows. “I can read, you know. “

“Sorry. It’s been a long day. My dad is slowly losing his mind and the guy who’s been helping me out with this is trying to help him out too –“ 

The pukwudgie’s forehead wrinkled. It wasn’t a pretty sight. “Why in Hell would he do that? I get why he’d help you, I guess, but your dad?” 

“Hey – my dad helps a lot of people.”

“But not your brother. Hasn’t done you any favors either, soldier boy.” 

Dean glared but bit his lip and kept it shut. He didn’t want to get into trouble. “That’s between them. Anyway, my dad is off doing something kind of stupid and Taurus is trying to keep him safe and I’m worried. I just want to get it over with.” 

“Mmm, sorry Dean. It’s a process. And there’s no way you could get out to California to do anything about it anyway, not in time.” The grayish skin around its mouth pursed for a moment. “The cure process is all about you, Dean, but I’m not interested in - Taurus, you said? – in Taurus getting hurt on your father’s behalf either. “All right. Without further ado. Tomorrow you get to go out to Anawan Rock. It’s in the place you call Rehoboth. You’ll go there as soon as you wake up. You’ll go completely unarmed, and you’ll sit there until the lights come to guide you back to your car. You can bring water with you. Nothing else, and you cannot leave the rock no matter what. Do you understand? Whatever happens, you sit there and you experience it.” Dean nodded. “All right. Enjoy, and bundle up. It should be chilly tomorrow.” 

When Dean woke up it was morning. He was sober and refreshed. The words of the pukwudgie were in his head. He was dying to know what had happened overnight in California, but he needed to go deal with the poison. He couldn’t affect anything in California anyway. He dressed carefully, in layers as hunters were wont to do, downloaded directions and set out for Rehoboth.

It was a beautiful if chilly Sunday. He got to the rock and looked at it. Someone had thoughtfully included a little plaque explaining that someone named Anawan had surrendered to a guy named Church way back at the dawn of time at this stupid phallic looking rock, ending a war Dean had never heard of. Okay. Great. Why did he already have the feeling that there had to be a lot more to the story than that? He settled in, back to the rock, and closed his eyes. He wasn’t the meditative type, never had been. That was more Sammy’s thing, but whatever. What he was good at was sleeping wherever he needed to, whenever he could get it. Maybe he couldn’t get a proper sleep here in the woods where anyone could just come along and do whatever but he could certainly get a restorative doze on, and when a guy has pukwudgie poison coursing through his veins what he wants most is sleep. He let the drowse overtake him, never quite losing his alertness.

What had that war been about, anyway? With the date and everything it was probably a colonial thing, colonists and natives. That was born out by the names. History books liked to pretend that once the Pilgrims in their black-and-white clothes had sailed over and built their little village by the rock everything had been roses and sunshine and everyone had just gotten along, but Dean knew better. Nothing ever worked like that. Maybe he hadn’t paid attention in history class and maybe he hadn’t gone to school in places that would have talked about colonial land wars between settlers and natives in New England but he knew that when colonists wanted land and natives didn’t want to leave it, things got ugly. Things got ugly and people stayed behind. 

He smelled smoke. The hunter looked around. He couldn’t see any smoke. He could still hear birds chirping and squirrels chittering and other woodland creatures rustling around in the bushes doing woodland creature things – he tried not to think about that – but he absolutely smelled smoke. At first he only thought he sniffed it but as he focused on it the scent became clearer. It wasn’t a good kind of smoke either, not burning wood and summer and campfires. It was burning rubbish, scorched tires and torched corpses. Bile rose in his throat. Still, while the scent filled his nose and mouth he could see nothing. The sky remained crisp and blue, no haze or cloud marring its intensity. He could hear only the normal and natural sounds of the forest. There was no heat at all, and in his current sickly state Dean would have really appreciated a little extra warmth. He wanted to cough but forced his lungs to behave calmly. In and out, slow and steady. In – one two three – out – one two three. Lather rinse repeat. There was no reason to panic. Unless there was. 

He couldn’t actually see the sun from his current position. He had no idea how long he’d actually been out here. It could have been five minutes or five hours. The shadows had moved, he could tell that much, but given the lateness of the year he just couldn’t quite make out what time it was. That was when the voices started. Some of them were just gibberish – completely incomprehensible to him. At first they were men entirely, sounding both like they were shouting and like they were a million miles away at the same time. How was this possible? His ears strained, trying to pick out sounds that he could recognize and failing. Scratch that then – sounds that repeated. There were plenty of those. A language of some kind then. Were they human? Demon? And then the other cries began, groans and moans and screams. Women and children mostly, although a few male voices joined them. Dean would have given just about anything to not hear them. He covered his ears, but they would not leave him. They were in his head, echoing around in his skull. Echoing around his soul. He had no idea what the voices were saying (screaming, begging, crying out) but they did not stop. And then they did. 

The sky had gone from blue to shades of pink. An image coalesced, transparent. His clothes resembled Pilgrim clothes, although they weren’t the all-black costume of Dean’s imagining, and a heap of severed Native heads lay at his feet. Far from seeming pleased the man’s face ran with tears. “This is not the harvest I sought,” he said in a voice with a strong English accent. “This is not the harvest I sought!” Golden lights appeared to Dean’s left and danced before him. He could leave now – if he was willing to step over the heads to do so.

Shuddering, he stepped gingerly. Dean made his way back to the Impala, eyes on the dancing lights and not on anything else. He didn’t check his computer when he got home. He didn’t shower. He went straight for the whiskey.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anawan Rock is a real place and a real historical site in Rehoboth, MA. Some of Dean's experiences there are taken from stories people have told about their own alleged encounters. I may have embellished a little. I have not visited the rock and can't really evaluate those stories myself.


	7. I'm Walking Down That Long, Lonesome Road Girl

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Negotiation and sympathy are important skills for future lawyers. Some Winchesters get a bath. Another Winchester gets a higher-level view of his situation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Allusions to sexual abuse of young children in the distant and recent past - may be triggering to some readers. 
> 
> Also, slight implications of suicidal thoughts. Again, may be triggering to some readers.

*Sam * 

Nothing illustrated Sam’s Stanford experience better than getting Brady’s keys. “Yeah, sure, take them,” the blond told him with a smirk that threatened to drive the brunet a little wild. “Whatever you need, Winchester. We can talk about the rental fee when you get back.” There was no way to mistake his meaning, not with the way that his blue eyes sparkled and the corner of his lip curled up into a smirk.

He glanced at Meli, remembering that Brady was emphatically not out and Sam was still best described as “questioning.” Fortunately, the senior had stepped a little ways away and seemed pretty engrossed with her conversation with Dean. (Sam would dearly love to be the one talking to Dean, but that couldn’t happen, not even remotely.) “I’m pretty sure you’ll come out on top,” he murmured very quietly.

“Who says I want to?” the shorter man retorted. 

Meli hung up the phone. “We don’t have much time,” she warned. “Let’s go.” 

“Thanks Brady.” 

They raced toward the student long-term parking lot, which was actually a good distance from the dorm. “So what’s the plan here, Sam?” she asked him as they found the car. 

He shook his head. Yeah, this was his Stanford experience all right. Brady’s car was a newer-model BMW SUV. He shook his head, got into the driver’s seat and threw his bags into the back seat. Then he banged his knees on the steering wheel and moved the seat back as far as it would go. God he missed the Impala. Not, he remembered, that he was often allowed to drive it. “We’re going to have to go to his house,” he informed her, pulling out onto the street carefully. “The best case scenario is that no one is home but the book he used to do the summoning is. I heard from one of the best lore guys there is, Bobby Singer. He said that if we can find the spell book that Perez used to summon the creature here we should be able to figure out how to send it home.” The car even had freaking GPS. How many fights between him and his father would have been avoided if they’d just had GPS? Then he could have just pounded on the stupid GPS unit instead of on him for a while. He punched an address around the block from the professor’s into the system and started to follow it and gave her a smile.

“I told your brother I’m your girlfriend,” she told him. “Well, Taurus’ girlfriend. Just so we get our stories straight.”

He laughed out loud. “That’s hilarious.” 

She actually looked kind of offended, which made him feel kind of funny. “Why is that so hilarious?”

“Besides the fact that neither Taurus nor Browning actually exists? Because apparently my dad called Dean in a panic because he thinks Taurus is sleeping with Sam – me.” He grinned.

“Oh.” She blushed and started laughing. “Great.” She shook her head. “Your life is weird, man.”

“Yeah, well, you’re caught up in it now.” He laughed too.

“Is your dad really that homophobic?”

“I didn’t think so – I mean, I knew he wouldn’t be okay if Dean or I was into guys, but Dean wasn’t and I wasn’t allowed to be into anyone so it never came up.” He shrugged. “Maybe he’s just freaked by the idea of working with someone who’s in such close contact with gross dirty tainted Sammy, you know?” 

She put a hand on his arm. “It’s okay, Sam.”

“What is?” 

“Being mad at your dad. Or being into guys. Or both.” 

He let his laughter relax into just a grin. “I’ve been mad at my dad for more than a decade. Seems like I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t. The rest of it is all new, and it kind of seems like I’ve got more important things to worry about than if it’s guys or just one guy or what. You know, like a creepy monster out of children’s stories and six missing kids.”

She squeezed his arm affectionately before dropping it. “Good point. But if you want to talk or something…”

“Thanks, Meli.” He smiled. 

Dr. Perez lived up in Burlingame – a nice enough neighborhood, Sam decided. Maybe someday he’d have a house up here. It wasn’t too far from Stanford. Everything looked plenty safe. Of course, appearances could be deceiving. They hadn’t done a lot of jobs in neighborhoods like this but they’d done enough, and of course right now he and Meli were rolling up in a borrowed SUV to break into a nice suburban home and steal a priceless summoning tome or fight with a spellcaster so there was that. 

Lights were, in fact, on. “Crap,” he hissed. 

“What do we do?” she whispered as they circled around the block. 

“Well, remember what I told you about the conning and lying?” She nodded. “Let’s do it.” 

She stomped a foot. “Are you insane? If he decides to make a fuss about us being around do you really think that the cops are going to want to hear about whatever sob story you concoct? They’re going to take one look at my permatan and drag my butt to jail!” 

He grimaced. He didn’t want that to be true, and he wanted to be able to tell her that it wasn’t, but who was he kidding? “We just won’t get caught. We’re Stanford students, we’re supposed to be intrusive and arrogant, right?” 

He grabbed her hand and held it, leading her right up to the front door and ringing the doorbell. The door was answered by a pretty woman in her late thirties with graying dark hair and hollow cheeks. “Can I help you?” she demanded. 

Stomach completely aflutter Sam gave her his best brilliant smile. “Hi, I’m Sam and this is my colleague Meli. We’re from the Stanford Independent. I am so sorry to bother you at home without an appointment but I just got this assignment an hour ago – my editor just found out about Professor Perez’ latest book, ‘Paying the Piper: The Importance of Contract and Obligation in Myth’ and he is just desperate to get an article into this Monday’s paper. I know it’s really rude and really, really unorthodox but do you think Professor Perez might be available to talk to us about the book?” He gave her his best pleading look, noting that she looked like she hadn’t slept in some time. 

She paused for a moment. “It might do him some good,” she decided quietly. “Bryan!” she called. “There are some reporters from the student paper here for you!” 

Footsteps sounded from another room and after a moment the professor himself came into view. He was about forty, olive-skinned and not very tall. His moustache was completely gray and his eyes were completely sunken. Sam repeated his spiel in a slightly different variation, adding a little more flattery and adulation and just enough knowledge of the man’s work to make it clear that he was a fan. And to be honest, he kind of was. The guy had done a lot of research. Perez sighed. “Thanks. I’d be happy to give you an interview. Why don’t we go into my study?” He guided them into a small room off the living room, right in the front of the house. It was full of books and Sam knew then and there that this was what he wanted. He didn’t care if he had a big house like this or an apartment, but he wanted a room full of books just like this one. A room that was bursting at the seams with his books, that he could just refer to when he wanted them. Books that he wouldn’t need to abandon at a moment’s notice. “All right. Why don’t we talk a little bit about your article then?” he suggested. He pasted a smile onto his face or at least as much of a smile as he could.

“Well,” Sam began. “My editor was very interested in talking about the concept of oath-breaking, and contract-breaking, and when an obligation is created as it applies to myth and legend. What are these myths supposed to be telling us? For example, what would you say that the story of the Pied Piper is telling us?”

The professor licked his lips and glanced down. There it was – an old, leather-bound tome, right there on his desk. The yellowed pages lacked the precision of machine-cut paper. Could they be vellum or parchment? He began to talk about the concept of obligation in general and about how the burghers of Bremen had refused to pay for the removal of the rats – all things that Sam knew. The teen’s heart pounded in his ears. The suspect kept looking down at the book and there was fear in his eyes, definite fear. Sam knew that he was right but was he right about everything?

He reached out and placed his fingertips on the tome at an appropriate pause in the narrative. The older man paled. “I’m very curious, Professor. What does this book say on the subject?” 

“T-that’s a very old, very valuable book,” he stuttered. 

“Oh, I know, sir.” He tried to keep his voice as gentle as he could – he knew that his height could be intimidating sometimes, and that wasn’t what he was going for now. 

“It’s not related to that book,” the professor insisted. 

“We know,” Meli told him. She, too, spoke gently. “It’s okay. We know why.” 

“You don’t know anything. I didn’t do anything. I’m calling the –“ 

“I wouldn’t, Dr. Perez.” It was a difficult balance, inserting enough steel into his voice to keep control while remaining sympathetic. “Really, we want to try to help you out.”

“What would you know about it then?” he spat. 

“You need to let the Piper go,” he told him softly. “You need to send it back.” 

“No. Not until there’s justice for my daughter.” 

Meli bit her lip. “Professor, these kinds of summoned creatures, they always turn on the one who summoned them. Every single time. They don’t like to be held captive. Let us help you.”

“I don’t care about that,” he informed them. Tears spilled from his eyes but his voice didn’t waver. “Look, I wouldn’t expect you to understand. You’re not parents. You’re normal young kids, but when I found out what had been done to my little girl – no. Until someone has paid for what happened to her, until she has justice, I can’t give this up.” 

Sam sighed. “Dr. Perez, I know it’s… difficult… to get past something like this. But victimizing innocent kids is not going to get justice for your daughter. It’s not going to give her back her peace of mind or her sense of security.” He remembered back to a crappy kids’ pizza chain and a clown, forced down the memory before it could distract him. That life was behind him now. “Believe me.” 

“It will draw attention to what’s happening.” He choked back a sob. “It will make parents more cautious about where they leave their kids.”

He came around the desk and put his arms around the man’s shoulders, hands on his biceps. It was a reassuring gesture – but one that could become a restraint very quickly. “Maybe. But it didn’t matter how diligent you were about this place, Dr. Perez. You couldn’t have stopped this. What happened to Linda was not your fault. Okay? It wasn’t your fault, and it wasn’t your wife’s fault. And it wasn’t your daughter’s fault –“ 

“How could you even say that?” he hissed, looking at Sam in horror.

“-and you’re probably going to have to remind her that it’s not her fault a few times in her life, okay? Trust me on this.” He turned the father’s chair so he was facing Sam. “The only person who is really to blame is the one who actually committed the crime. And the one who said they were doing background checks and wasn’t.” 

“How do you know about that?” he demanded. 

“Because it’s my job to find the person who summoned this thing and send it back where it came from. There’s a guy out there right now looking to save those kids. He’s already got a broken wrist from trying to do it.”

“I… I…” The man’s lip quivered. “I just can’t.”

“It’s okay. I can do it for you.” He glanced at Meli, who moved slowly forward. 

“The kids aren’t in any danger,” the professor insisted. “The Piper is keeping them safe underground. They’re happy there.”

“They aren’t happy, Dr. Perez. They’re in the dark. They can’t move. He’s not feeding them. All they can do is sit there and listen to each other cry. That’s what the little boy who got out said. They’re terrified and alone. Is that what you would want for Linda?” 

He shook his head. “No.” Meli reached out and grabbed the book. “Thank you, Dr. Perez. I’m really glad you were willing to work with us.”

“You won’t… you won’t tell anyone, will you?” he asked, plaintively. 

“Who would believe us? Except hunters. Just… don’t go looking to do this kind of thing again, okay, sir?” Sam asked. “It just… it doesn’t go anywhere good. We’re not hunters, but there are people out there who don’t really look at this kind of thing with an open mind, you know? They, uh, they don’t care why you do the things you do. Just that you do them.” He gave a grim half-smile.

“Are there really?” He drew a shuddering sigh. “They spend their time hunting down things like this and sad old men instead of monstrous people who hurt children?” 

“Yes, Dr. Perez. And the thing to remember with them? They don’t need judges. They don’t have juries. Just executions.” He held out a hand. “Thanks for your time, sir.” They left the house, walking very quickly toward the car. 

“That was grim,” Meli said. She struggled to keep up with his long stride and he remembered to hold himself back a bit. “Do you want to tell me what that was all about?”

“He should know that if he does anything like this again that it might be some hunter that comes after him, Meli. Not me. Not you, unless you decide to go that route. Real hunters, like my dad. There was no reason to hurt him. He was grieving. Someone hurt his child. He needed to do something to strike back. I get it. We were able to talk him down, you know? I wish someone had talked my dad down after my mom died.” He pulled out the “Taurus” phone. “Can you do me a favor and call Mac Leeson? We know my dad is off doing something stupid. It would be good to know where. Coe Park is a big place.” 

They got to the car just as Leeson picked up. “Hi, Mr. Leeson? We’ve spoken before. This is Taurus’ associate, Browning. Yes, I heard about your ankle. I hope you’re keeping it elevated? Good. Oh, you’re definitely going to need reconstructive surgery. I’m no doctor but running on that? No way you can avoid it. Anyway, where did John Winchester say he was going? We’re going to try to unsummon the thing.” She paused, buckling her seat belt. “Coit Lake. Right. Thank you!”

He punched in directions for a pharmacy. “First things first.” 

“What’s that?” 

“Earplugs aren’t usually part of my standard kit. We need to load up.”

*John * 

John parked his truck up by the intersection of Coit Road and Willow Ridge Road. It was as close to his quarry as he could get and it seemed like the easiest way for him to find his way back if he got turned around. The earplugs Taurus had provided were secure in his ears. He was armed with a crowbar and two good iron knives. A good old-fashioned six-shooter with consecrated iron rounds was holstered at his hip; he hoped he wouldn’t need it, since iron rounds were pricey and getting them consecrated was a bitch and a half, but he had it if he needed it. The night was dark and to be honest going around alien territory alone at night probably wasn’t going to make his top ten list of brilliant moves but hey – it had to be done. You didn’t just let a job slide because it got dark out. 

He inched slowly along the trail. The earplugs minimized the noise but they didn’t completely eliminate it. He couldn’t hear his feet over the brush but if he broke a stick he knew about it. He didn’t like this, this voluntary dulling of one of his senses. In the dark like this it seemed like he’d lost two and with his busted wrist this just didn’t seem like a great idea. He had a flashlight. The batteries were new. It would have to be enough. He let the trail guide him up to the lake. 

There weren’t any other people around, not at this time of year. No campers, no derelicts, no young kids looking for a place to drink and smoke weed and make out – nothing. He still crept along as silently as he could, hoping that the earplugs weren’t masking anything he needed to know about. They were maddening, just maddening. Knowing that he might not be able to hear the enemy before the terrible blast of that oboe came made him want to scratch the ears right off his head. He saw the lake as he crested the hill leading up to it. Well, if he was going to die in pursuit of the Pied Piper he supposed that this was as beautiful a resting place as any. The moon reflected off the water, providing enough light to see. He drank in the sight. Once he and Mary had enjoyed moonlit nights like this. Never again. 

Now he heard it – the first tone, commanding and insistent. It ordered him to flee, to run back to his truck and return no more. His heart did speed up and he could feel the adrenaline begin to pump through his veins but his feet remained planted right where they were. The effect of the spell was so diminished as to be negated. He grinned. The guy might bat for the pink team and he might be a jerk who wouldn’t ever get his own hands dirty but at least he came up with decent solutions. 

He moved forward. If he looked carefully he could see the monster, nothing but a shadow by the moonlight. It was tall – too tall to ever pass among humanity without comment, a good seven and a half feet tall at least. Its limbs, too, were stretched and disproportionate, like tree branches with no leaves. It was clad, although in this lighting John could see no more than the fact that it wasn’t naked, and its hair was at least shoulder length and stringy. It blew on its oboe again, and again he felt an urge to run. He continued to ignore the urge, just as he might ignore an urge to scratch an itch until he could do so unobserved. John laughed and jogged down the trail to meet his prey. Beanpole or not, it was going down.

Good lord this thing was ugly. The only thing he could think of was Beetlejuice, like from the movie. Its eyes were yellow, with pinprick pupils and no whites at all, and its skin was the color of sun-bleached bone. A rictus spread across its face as it realized that John had found some way of thwarting its spell and a horrible hissing kind of sound issued forth from its chest. After a second John realized that it was laughter. 

The Piper pulled out a sword. It was long and narrow, and it glowed. John hefted his crowbar in his one good hand. He wasn’t about to be intimidated by a giant stick insect with a lightsaber. He was John Winchester. He’d fought countless monsters and men too. Nothing scared him. It hissed at him and charged, waving its sword over its head. He blocked and ducked in under the weapon, hitting it in the ankle with his crowbar as he ran in and springing back as it swiped at him. The Piper wasn’t thrilled by this turn of events, which didn’t really surprise him. “Give me back the kids, you sick bastard,” he growled.

It licked its lips at him and stabbed out wildly. This time the blade grazed his arm and he couldn’t help but grunt. Whatever the weapon was made from seemed to have an electric current running through it. He staggered back but recovered himself enough to parry the next blow that came at him. (He decided to worry about how the current wasn’t conducted through the iron crowbar but was through his skin another time, like if he survived.) He heard another note – the thing opened its mouth and the note just poured forth like Joshua and the walls of Jericho. How was that even possible? What the hell was this thing? The ground beneath his feet began to change, growing soft then saturated. His boots began to sink into the mud that had previously been hard-baked dirt. Crap, he thought. 

The Piper brought in its sword again. The hunter tried to block but his technique relied on a highly mobile style. He was a good fighter and he was as good as anybody when it came to adapting and learning new things, but the middle of a fight with opponent who had him beat on size and weapon was really neither the time nor place to be doing so. He deflected two blows completely but the third was deflected into his leg, cutting deep into his shin. That jolting sensation ran right through him and he cried out this time, biting back after the sound escaped his lips. Another blow rained down, this time at his good arm. The pain from the shock was so intense that he heard his own voice rise a couple of octaves, and he fell to his knees in the mud.

In the distance he heard a car. He was essentially helpless before the creature. He couldn’t reach it, not from this distance. Wait – he wasn’t completely helpless. He reached into his hip holster and pulled out his gun. Aiming for the thing’s head, he pulled the trigger. It disappeared, reappearing behind him and cutting him across his back. He grunted, bracing himself against the mud with his non-broken arm. Wherever the car had come from it pulled to a stop. Two car doors slapped shut. A voice that sounded downright familiar began to recite in Latin as the wind picked up.

John looked up at the Piper, who stared at people behind the hunter. It didn’t seem to be fighting them. The rictus disappeared, and as the man’s voice rose with the wind the thing’s face moved from horrible to… grateful, somehow? A soft lavender light appeared in the middle of the lake. The monster took a moment to salute the people who had just arrived with its sword before it was drawn out there, into the light. And then the light was gone. John turned around to see two people. One was taller than he was and pretty clearly male, one short and pretty clearly female. The male was white. The female was not. Both of them wore hoodies with the hoods up over their heads and drawn tight, so their faces weren’t visible. The male quickly shoved a red, leather-bound book into the powder-blue BMW soccer-mom mobile.

The woman stepped forward quickly. “The cuts aren’t deep,” she told her companion, her voice muffled by the hood. “I think he’ll be okay.” The male reached into the car and pulled out a small vinyl bag – a medical kit, John realized. He gestured to the woman, who came and got it while he divested himself of things like the keys and the phone. The woman started looking at John’s injuries and trying to bandage him while the man scanned the water. 

“What the hell is he doing?” John asked her.

“Uh, missing kids?” she reminded him. Her tone spoke volumes. “That is why we’re all here, right?” 

Shit. Right. Missing kids. Six of them. “Is that actually Taurus?” he whispered. 

“Yeah.” 

The beanstalk seemed to see something because he started into the water and began wading out toward something John could barely see. When he took a moment for his eyes to adjust he managed to figure it out – a tiny figure, only a white shirt reflecting the light. After a second he saw another. “I’ll get this one,” he told her. 

“What about your injuries?” she asked him. 

“Deal with them later,” he retorted, already halfway into the water. “You wait for the kids.”

She muttered something that sounded foreign – maybe Creole? – but waited on the shore with the medical kit. Taurus had gotten to a point where he was over his head now and was actually swimming toward his target, but another had popped up just past the first. John kept going for his own target, flipping the little boy over onto his back as soon as he reached him and dragging him gently back until he was at a point where carrying him was more reasonable than floating him. “Breathing,” he told the woman, laying the boy out on the beach at her feet before plunging back in for another rescue.

Taurus must not have been as skinny as he looked because he had both kids in his arms as he emerged from the lake, one gasping, one not. The woman immediately began work to restore breath to the one having difficulty as her companion returned to the depths. John found the next child, a little blond thing that reminded him of a young Dean, quickly. He was breathing which was about all you could reasonably ask for under such circumstances. Taurus was able to grab another and bring him back in, handing him off to John instead of to the woman before returning to the lake. What, exactly, was going on out there? Taurus began to swim, long strokes that took him far from shore quickly. There he paused, treading water. “At least I hope he’s treading water,” he muttered from where he’d come to stand next to the woman.

He couldn’t see her face from inside the hoodie but he imagined that it would have been scornful mixed with contempt. “Seriously? What do you think he’s doing, riding a dolphin?” 

“Some kind of spell, who knows?” 

“Then how did he know how to get rid of the thing?” 

“John Winchester.” He held out a hand.

She didn’t take it. “You can call me Browning.” 

“You work for Taurus?” 

“I work with him.” 

Touchy. Okay. “Are you a hunter?”

“No. I’m his girlfriend. Look, stay with these kids a minute. We grabbed some blankets for them, all right?” She went back to their Beemer. 

A girlfriend. Oh. Okay. So maybe this guy wasn’t some kind of pervert after all. He looked at the kids, shivering and miserable. They looked at him. One started to cry.

Taurus dove. He stayed under the water. John shifted. It should be him out there, not some academic in a BMW. 

The girl came back with blankets for all of the kids, warm flannel blankets fresh from the plastic wrap. John helped to distribute the items. 

Taurus came back up empty handed, head thrown back for a moment. He dove again. 

“He do this a lot?” John asked by way of making conversation.

“Not when I have anything to say about it.”

“He’s actually pretty good at it. This whole rescuing thing. He ever think about taking up hunting?” 

“He grew up in it,” she told him. “He and his family didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of things. They cut him loose.” 

“It’s a shame. Seems like they threw away a good guy in the fight against evil.” 

She turned to face him. “Does it look like he’s given up any kind of fight against evil to you? There’s more than one way to fight.” She exhaled, a deep sigh that he could hear even through the thick fleece. “But yeah – they threw him a way like old trash, that’s for sure.”

Taurus came up again, this time with a tiny pale figure he struggled to keep on its back. The man kicked furiously but didn’t seem to be using his free arm much. It seemed to take forever for him to reach the shore and when he did it was plain to see what the problem was. The little boy in question had been badly injured in the leg on some kind of debris; Taurus’ own hoodie had been torn and was showing quite a lot of blood seeping through the multiple layers of fabric. The child was not breathing.

Browning took the child into her arms and immediately began resuscitation. Fortunately the boy was able to expel the water from his lungs quickly and start breathing on his own, accepting the blanket they wrapped around him and sobbing. “You’re hurt!” John pointed out to his ally. “You’d better get that dealt with. 

The man shrugged and gestured to Browning. “I’m actually with him on this, believe it or not,” she retorted. John was reminded of something Taurus had told Dean during the case in Fall River – something about his partner having a real beef with him. Was that why they were hiding their faces? “That needs stitches, buddy.” He shook his head and reached into the backseat. He handed Browning a telephone and gestured to the kids. “Oh – you want me to call ambulances for these missing kids.” He nodded. “Okay, but who’s going to stay with them until the authorities get here? We can’t just leave a bunch of toddlers alone in the woods at night, who does that?” Taurus gestured. “All right, Winchester, are you willing to stay with these kids until help gets here?”

He sighed. “Well, it’s not the best idea. Apparently there’s this little matter involving a misunderstanding down at the Stanford campus.” 

“So give them a false name. Whatever name you gave them when you found the kid the last time. I need to get my prince charming here stitched up before he bleeds out all over someone’s nice car.” She grabbed him by the arm and steered him back toward the car, wrapping another blanket around him. “No, you are not going to be doing your own stitches. This is why we have health insurance. Four syllables. Learn to use them in conjunction with each other. It’s a basic concept. Ugh.” She bustled around, wrapping something around the arm before buckling him in and adjusting the seat. “Hello, 9-1-1? I’d like to report finding six small children in Coit Lake. They were all in the lake with no adult supervision at night; they were pulled out. We’ve left them there with a friend in relatively good physical health. My boyfriend was injured rescuing them from the water and needs a hospital; I’m driving him there now. Yes, six ambulances please.” She hung up and drove away, leaving John alone with six sobbing children and a lot of questions.

The police had more questions. The first question of course was how he’d managed to be present for both rescues. The children – the ones who’d been conscious of course – backed up his story of not having been the one to put them there. He explained that he’d been out for a drive after he and Leeson had found that one kid and seen “suspicious activity,” gotten into an altercation and been aided by some passers-by. That was all the information he had. They had nothing to hold him on, of course, and so they let him go. They had to. They drove him back to his truck and he drove himself back to the motel. Leeson was a free man and happy to hear it, although he elected to remain where he was another night. He’d taken another dose of his pain medication and wasn’t so keen on driving, a decision with which John could not argue. 

John wasn’t going to be sticking around California. It didn’t do great things to his personality. He crashed down into his bed and closed his eyes, falling asleep almost immediately. He would never forget the look of gratitude on the Piper’s face.

*Dean * 

Dean had a hangover when he woke up. This was entirely expected. He went and showered. He took some Advil. He went to the diner and got something greasy with a side of grease – he wasn’t even sure what he was ordering – for breakfast, which helped. Amazingly, by the time that the hangover cleared he found that he was feeling almost better. Almost like a person again. He could still feel the sickness, the poison, crawling around inside him but it wasn’t like it had been. He found he was able to do things again like laundry – not that it had been piling up in the most repulsive manner – and dishes. He could pack. Dad’s bedding he stripped and washed and packed. He didn’t know when they’d have a use for them again but Dad had brought them here and he kind of liked them, so he packed them and brought them down to the Impala. Dad had few other belongings that he’d left behind – the man believed in traveling light, that was for sure. Dean had some actual personal belongings, though. Not many, at least not many that he wouldn’t need. Still, there were enough things that he wanted to make sure that he had them. His guns and knives, his photographs. Only then did he check his email. 

There was the usual note from Taurus. “Checking in to see how you’re feeling.”

“A lot better,” he admitted. “Although out of all of the parts of the cure that part was the absolute worst.” He included a description of what he’d experienced. “I’m pretty sure that’s the first ghost I didn’t waste.”

“You don’t know that was a ghost,” Taurus reminded him when he replied something like two hours later. “Pukwudgies can cast illusions. The voices and the fire and the other foul smells – those are reported at the Rock pretty frequently though.” 

“Were you able to get hold of Dad?” he shot back. “And why would sitting through a ghost experience be part of a pukwudgie cure?” 

“Who knows?” came the response. “And while we weren’t able to stop your father from going into the woods we were able to catch up with him. The case is over. I’m probably going to sleep for a week, which is more or less what Browning is trying to get me to do anyway.” 

“I’m sure,” he teased. “Did he say where he was going to go or what he wanted to do?”

“Not to us. But I’m sure he won’t want to stick around. I’m pretty sure California doesn’t agree with him.”

Dean sighed. In his fantasy world, Dad would go find Sammy. Sammy would say he was sorry, Dad would forgive Sammy and bring him back home. They would all be a family again and get back to the way things were supposed to be. That wouldn’t be how it actually went, of course. Dad wasn’t about to forgive Sammy because that wasn’t how Dad operated, and Sammy wasn’t about to ask for forgiveness because he didn’t see that he needed to be forgiven for anything. The two of them were fine on their own. It was Dean who was left twisting in the wind. 

He checked in with Pastor Jim, who confirmed their Thanksgiving plans. He watched some more TV. He drank a little more to steel himself ahead of the pukwudgie encounter and then he went to bed. “Aw, Dean. I’m starting to think you don’t want to see me anymore,” the creature mocked him. “Come on, Dean. Didn’t you like our last game?” 

“Corpse smells? Severed heads around a pilgrim? Come on. That was something straight out of a bad horror flick.” He waved a hand. “What does that have to do with healing a guy from a poison you put there in the first place?” 

“Ah ah, Dean. I only put it there because you were hunting me, remember? Your intent was to kill me. Correct?” 

“Well, yeah. You’re a demon.” 

“No. I’m a quasi-demonic entity but not actually a demon. I hate humanity, it’s true. Filthy grotesque parasites the lot of you. But it’s not like I go out of my way to hurt you or to damage you. Not in a very long time. I mostly want to be left alone. I was curious about you, sure. You got rid of that irritating Red Sox fan who’s been getting on my nerves for his entire afterlife. I’d probably have given you a pass just for that. But no, you had to get some macho idea about how you were going to prove yourself to your old man by hunting down something that your betters were teling you couldn’t actually kill.” 

“Are you trying to tell me that Taurus is better than me?” the human bristled.

“Maybe I should have said different,” the monster snickered. “Your different-ers? Is that a word? It is now. Anyway. Don’t try to dodge the point here, buddy. You had to prove a macho point to your father – who, let’s be real, wouldn’t have noticed either way – “ 

“What the hell do you know about my family?” he growled.

“Oh, Dean, don’t you get it? It was your whole need to prove something to your family that got you into this. Your need to prove something to a family member who really doesn’t give two hoots about you. But it’s family that’s getting you out of it too. You’re going back to where it all started.”

“Lawrence?” 

The creature’s brows knit together. “No, brain trust. Where it all started for you and me. And for me and your family. You’re going back to Freetown. You’re going to Assonet Ledge.” 

Dean shook his head in confusion. “But… wait, I’m pretty sure that’s one of the places Taurus wanted me to stay the hell away from if I was alone.” 

“Dean, you’re never alone. Not now that I’m with you. Not even in the shower.” 

“That’s… really, really repulsive.”

“I aim to please.”

“I think you need to take another look at your definition of ‘please.’”

“I didn’t say who I aimed to please, did I?” The pukwudgie smirked. “Now. On to business. Tomorrow you’re going to go to Assonet Ledge, back in Freetown. No need to worry. I promised Taurus you’d be safe through all the steps of the cure. Not necessarily comfortable,” he added at Dean’s look, “but safe. You can bring what you want. You can bring your whole arsenal. You can bring grappling hooks and rappel down the side if you really feel the need, although you’ll probably find that difficult until you’ve found what I’ve sent you for. Enjoy your trip.”

Dean awoke with a start. The sun streamed through his windows. It was time to go. He got dressed, headed out the door and aimed his baby toward Freetown. It wasn’t hard to get to the Ledge. There was a parking area right nearby; he knew to expect about a forty-five minute hike in to the site. He had a backpack with him, largely filled with rope. He didn’t care what the creepy little creature said about promises it made to Taurus. It was watching him shower; its word was invalid. 

This close to Halloween the wind had a real chill to the air. Bugs, at least, weren’t something he was going to worry about. Finally, at the end of the road, he came to the Ledge. 

On a clear day like this he could appreciate the beauty of this place. Maybe the fall foliage was past its prime but he could still see that it was there, and he could see for miles from here. Miles and miles, with no telephone poles or wires or anything. It was stunningly beautiful. The place had a reputation as a popular place to end one’s own life; he supposed that if he was going to go, there were worse things to see as one’s final vision. Like whatever might be at the bottom of the body of water at the bottom of the ledge, he guessed. Research suggested that it went down eighty feet. Rumor suggested divers had never found the bottom. He backed away from the edge slowly. Dean was not despondent. 

Maybe he was a little down. Who wouldn’t be? His whole family had kind of ditched him. He was all alone, and cold, and stuck up here at the top of the world. Dad was off doing whatever, completely unburdened from the shackles of family life. Sammy had no use whatsoever for a big brother. He was just… Dean. Alone.

And where had that crap come from? Yeah, sure, it had come from somewhere, but not to pull him back toward the ledge like that. He backed away faster. Dad still needed his good little soldier, even if he didn’t need him at his side right this minute. He still checked in to make sure that he was following the rules, doing things the right way. He needed that because Sammy had turned out so wrong. He needed the assurance that one of his kids had turned out okay. Dean still had a purpose – supporting Dad, no matter what. He’d made it safely away from the edge now, far enough that the sudden despondency had receded. Where had that come from? 

Well, a few of the sources had warned about that actually. It was why he’d come with the rope. People reported overwhelming feelings of sadness, and many of the reported suicides here had come “out of the blue.” He looked around. Most of the area of the ledge itself was pretty bare, just rock and a sudden drop off. Back here by the tree line, though, there were, well, trees. Funny how that worked. Dean was here because he was supposed to find something. Well, he thought to himself. You can’t find something if you don’t freaking look. Sharp green eyes scanned the trees, then dropped to ground level. Nothing looked particularly out of place, no more so than one would expect in a place like this. 

Except… After about twenty minutes he finally found something. There was a rock, painted black with three red dots. He didn’t know why there were three red dots. Maybe it had some kind of cosmic pukwudgie significance. Maybe it just looked cool. He picked up the rock and withdrew something from underneath it. 

The object proved to be a plastic bag, a little press-and-seal sandwich bag type of thing. Inside the bag were some photographs. At the top of the pile was a picture of … was that Sammy? Yeah, that was Sammy all right, but young. Maybe fifteen or sixteen? And that was the Ledge – right here, Assonet Ledge. Sam had been here. At Assonet Ledge, right where Dean had felt those feelings of despondency. Had Sam felt them too? What did the kid have to be despondent about? Protected, cosseted, insulated from everything to the extent possible given their circumstances – that kid shouldn’t have had anything whatsoever to trigger that… that ledge-power or whatever it was. And yet there he was, in the picture, looking down and not looking terribly frightened. Looking fascinated, in fact. 

The next picture was taken a little later, if the foliage was anything to go by. This time Sam seemed to be looking at the camera. He wasn’t actually smiling, but when had that kid ever smiled? He looked more relaxed that Dean could remember having seen him at that age, though.

“I met him here.” The pukwudgie appeared beside Dean now. “I don’t know where you were but he missed you terribly. It was about three years ago or so.”

“Dad wanted some ‘alone time’ with Sammy,” Dean remembered. “He wanted to make him get his head into the game, make a better hunter out of him.” 

“I think it was a whole week before he found his way out here. Your brother was a pretty unhappy soul.” 

“What the hell did he have to be unhappy about?”

“Even my father loved me, Dean. And I’m a monster.”

“Dad loved Sammy.” 

“Loved him enough to hound him right out the door. I mean, whatever. It’s nothing to me. Like I said, I’d have let you walk until you decided to go hunting me. Then it’s just self-defense, but I noticed that you smelled like him. So I paid him a visit – just an excuse to see him again, really. I’ve never met such an incredible creature. He’s going to do great things someday, Dean. Great things.” 

“His place is with us.” 

“You were holding him back. Trying to make him restrain his potential, dull his edge. Limit himself. And you’d have killed him eventually. Your father still might try. But whatever. That’s neither here nor there. You keep talking about how he’s abandoned you, how little he cares about you. Sam is the only reason you’re still alive, Dean. And I could have just waved my hand and cured you if I’d wanted to. But frankly your attitude toward him pisses me off, so while I promised him I’d let you live I told him that you were going to have to work for it.” 

“And he was okay with that?” 

”He didn’t get a choice. Is that really what you’re choosing to take away here? What you should be taking away from this is that I gave him the opportunity to get revenge on the person he loved most, who rejected him in the harshest way possible – without even telling him, just by disconnecting the only means he had of reaching him – and instead he begged me to save your miserable life. Go back to your hovel, Dean. Sleep. When you wake up you’ll be cured. But don’t think that the next time I’ll give him the same opportunity to save you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Assonet Ledge is a real place. The effect described has been reported here; whether this is the result of supernatural influence or the fact that it's a really, really tall cliff depends on your individual beliefs. Either way, avoid the edge. You can enjoy the view just fine from several feet back.


	8. Where I'm Bound, I Can't Tell (Epilogue)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loose ends are tied up.

*Sam *

They rode back to campus in silence, Sam changing his soggy garments for dry ones in the back of the SUV while Meli drove. She didn’t look and it wasn’t like he wasn’t a master of the modest change in tight quarters. He’d managed to avoid social services for however long, after all. He kept pressure on the wound on his chest, too, distinctly unenthusiastic about the prospect of having to stitch it up himself back on campus.

Of course, that wasn’t what happened. Instead of taking him back to the dorm Meli brought him by Student Health Services. Always before Sam had preferred to do his own stitching whenever possible – he’d never liked having Dad that close to him and he was just better at it than Dean. This time he had an actual professional to do the sewing, with real suture thread instead of dental floss and actual iodine and proper wound preparation instead of a splash of whiskey. He was sent home with a round of antibiotics just to be on the safe side – the cover story was that he’d had an accident while hiking, and who knew what kind of woodland creature had done what on the stick that had cut him so very deeply? They gave him painkillers that he had no intention of taking and sent him on his merry way. Then, and only then, was Meli willing to park the car and bring him home. 

She came to his room with him. “That was pretty.... That was intense,” she said then. He shrugged, which pulled his stitches.

“It wasn’t that bad. I mean, we lived. The kids lived. I didn’t shoot my father.” 

“I thought about it.” She shook her head. “He tried to get me to recruit you into hunting.” 

He laughed and shook his head. “No. Hell no. If it wasn’t for the kids I’d have left his ass out there.” 

“Really?” 

“Maybe.” He looked away. Seeing Dad had been hard, especially without the adrenaline of direct confrontation. Of course he was impressed with Sam’s work when he didn’t know it was Sam. “Honestly hunting isn’t so bad when you don’t have to kill things. Can’t even call it hunting, really.”

“The light out there, when it went back to wherever, that was amazing. It was beautiful. And the creature, it looked so happy.” She sighed. “It was like…”

“Nothing likes to be a tool, you know? And I get what Perez was doing.”

“You do?” 

“Hell yeah I do. Someone hurt his kid. It’s just… it wasn’t okay to enslave the Piper the way he did. I don’t think the Piper wants to hurt kids any more than we wanted it to. So we helped it, and we helped the kids, and I’d like to think that we helped Dr. Perez too.” 

“Is it wrong to admit that I’d rather help from campus, rather than out there in the muck? I was terrified,” Meli admitted.

He smiled at her. “That doesn’t go away. And for the record? Dad was an absolute ass for going out there alone. I’m not so keen on going out and getting into the hands-on anymore myself.” He lay back. “I’m here to get away from that.” And he was. 

They talked a little more, and she went to go rest and recuperate on her own. Sam went to wash up and return the keys to Brady, who very quickly put an end to all pretense of “payment” when he noticed that Sam had been injured.

He slept in on Sunday, emerging only when Ginny and Lisa arrived to absolutely, positively insist that he come to dinner with them at the student union. He trudged along with them and a few others feeling a bit more like a zombie than like a human, then trudged along home and went back to bed. 

Slowly life returned to its normal routine. Dean emailed his alter ego to let him know that the cure worked and that he was leaving Fall River and meeting up with Dad. Pastor Jim called to let him know that Dad would be spending the dread anniversary somewhere in New Mexico with Dean. This was fine by Sam. If Dad was away from Palo Alto he could afford to relax his guard and go back to his routine, resuming his workout schedule and his normal pace. He didn’t hear as much from Dean. He heard from him now and again but what with the pukwudgie cure being over and done with and no new cases on the horizon that required the use of a specialist, the hunter had not real need to call on him. It stung a little, but it wasn’t like Dean knew that Taurus was Sam and it wasn’t like he’d have wanted to stay connected if he did know. 

He didn’t have Dean. He also didn’t have the more stable kind of relationship he was increasingly sure he wanted. Not that he knew much about that kind of thing, but when he thought about it there were two people he could actually see himself with beyond the physical. Neither of them was particularly interested in that kind of relationship with him, of course. Brady was a friend, a good friend, and very open to occasional sex but wasn’t looking for a committed relationship right now. Meli was willing enough to pretend to be his girlfriend, but who was he kidding? She was his RA, it would be completely inappropriate and besides she kind of thought he was a ruthless murderer. So… no.

But that wasn’t why he’d come to school. He’d come here to get an education and to get hope. He was getting those things. He was doing very well in his classes thank you very much, and if he could continue at his current pace he should be very well able to make it to and through law school. He would be able to afford a decent apartment at least. He’d be able to help people, albeit in a different way than how he’d grown up. He’d gotten stitches for an injury from an actual professional, under his own name, with a prescription under his own name too that he could take as prescribed without hoarding. And if he didn’t have his brother he had friends who cared for him. Maybe he didn’t have the kind of deep committed lover that stories were written about – maybe that wasn’t in the cards for anyone named Winchester. But he had people who were willing to help him out with some very strange things indeed. He had people who would stand up to his father on his behalf. He had people who noticed if he didn’t eat and people who noticed if he didn’t sleep, and they took steps to correct both problems. They wanted him to succeed just as much as he wanted to succeed. Dean’s presence would have made life better. But life was still pretty darn good for Sam Winchester. 

*John * 

John woke up on Sunday morning. He didn’t have much to pack up but what he had he corralled and loaded into the truck. He helped Leeson get his own belongings together and got him situated back at his own home, made sure he was comfortable. There was no way the guy wasn’t going to be out of it for a good long time, with his ankle in the shape that it was. The Midwesterner hoped that he got the reconstructive surgery he was going to need. After that he bummed around for a little while. He thought about picking up a sweatshirt for Dean but reconsidered after a moment’s sober thought. It might screw up team discipline, and even if it didn’t that wouldn’t be a very nice thing to do. Finally, he drove over near the campus. 

He parked the truck a few blocks away, pulled a hat low over his face and stalked over. No one noticed him approach. Security here was an absolute joke. These kids were all just sitting ducks, waiting for the next monster to come along and devour them. Some played Frisbee on an expanse of lawn. Seriously? Frisbee? Monsters walked the earth – walked among them – and they were throwing a piece of plastic around? Some of them had books open as they lounged in the sun, earphones in like Sam always had. A few ran. 

He knew where he was going, of course. He aimed himself for Sam’s dorm. He took a roundabout route, of course, and he parked himself in some bushes near the entrance. He wasn’t going to enter – he was pretty sure that after his shameful display when he’d first gotten on the Pied Piper case this particular dorm would at least be more vigilant and he knew that Sam wasn’t going to be any more amenable to seeing him. Nor, he had to confess, was he likely to behave much better if he got so much as one unenthusiastic eyebrow twitch from the boy.

He’d have loved to say that he didn’t know why California exacerbated all of his less-loveable traits and turned him into the asshole of the month. He knew he tended to be harsh with Sam, and he thought that it was perfectly reasonable that he was angry about the whole getting him barred from campus thing. Trying to kick in his door might have been an overreaction. Anger was reasonable. Rage so blinding that all he saw was red – not so much.

When he’d thought Taurus might be gay he’d just about lost his mind. John had never had much patience for anyone who he saw as less than a man, but he also knew that who another guy screwed had very little to do with him. He knew the difference between a homosexual and a pedophile, for crying out loud, but when he’d been talking about Taurus the hate and filth had just come pouring out of his mouth like an oil well. 

It was California. It was what California represented – what Stanford represented. They represented Sam. They represented what Sam had done – how he’d turned his back, rejected the family. Rejected the mission. Rejected John’s control. And John had to admit that was what bothered him. Keeping Sam under control had been a keystone of his life and it had all blown up in his face. He should never have come here. Maybe someday, when it all was over and Mary had been avenged, he’d be able to look at this place and see it for what it was. For now though Stanford was John’s every failure, every screw-up, every defeat, all encased in a fancy academic coating.

At the same time… as much as he might not understand the boy, as much as he might not like the boy, as much as the boy might terrify him, Sam was still Mary’s son. She had adored that boy, loathed putting him down for just about any reason at all. As if she’d known her time with him would be short. He almost owed it to her to make sure he was safe, right? 

The boy didn’t emerge until around five o’clock, stuck in the middle of a knot of other young kids. Two young girls wrapped themselves around him, one on each side. Huh, John thought. On the one hand, the thought of Sam involved with girls at all kind of made him want to throw up. Whatever the thing that had killed Mary had wanted with the boy didn’t need to be passed on thank you very much. On the other hand, Dean had told him that girls had been interested in the kid, he’d just never seen it. Couldn’t very well unsee it now; the red-headed girl had her hand in Sam’s back pocket for crying out loud. Sam looked pale and exhausted, but he moved along with the little student amoeba as they made their way toward a large building labeled “Student Union.” He seemed to be favoring his right side a little bit too – he winced when the blonde girl laid her head on the side of his ribcage, like he’d been injured there or something. Huh. How did a kid injure himself on schoolbooks? Those paper cuts must be deadly. 

John followed them into the building and maintained a discreet but useful distance as they made their way toward what looked like a food court. Of course the boy would go for some damn fool foreign thing – Indian Express, it was labeled. He got some kind of vegetarian curry thing. What was wrong with a simple burger like a normal person? He caught his own ire rising and shook his head. Yeah, he needed to get away from this place. Sam was safe. He looked tired but otherwise healthy enough. 

He left the student union and walked back to the truck. He didn’t even think about it, he just started driving east. About three hours out he pulled into the first motel he found and called Dean. “Meet me in Las Cruces, New Mexico,” he instructed. “I’m pretty sure I can find us a case by the time you get there.” 

*Dean * 

Dean woke up when his phone rang. It was Dad. Of course it was Dad. “Sir?” he greeted.

Dad didn’t ask him about the cure. “Meet me in “Las Cruces, New Mexico,” he told him. “I’m pretty sure I can find us a case by the time you get there.” He hung up. 

Dean sighed. Five days worth of driving, more or less. It was all of one o’clock in the morning right now. Well, he’d gotten a solid eight hours, right? For a hunter that was decent. The pukwudgie had told him that he’d be cured when he woke, and he was. At least, he felt fine. Physically, anyway. 

The pukwudgie knew Sammy. Had spoken with Sammy, recently. Sammy had begged for his life. Couldn’t be bothered to stay and have his back, but pleaded with a quasi-demonic thing for his life. What had he been forced to offer the monster? How had he managed to convince the thing? 

And what the hell had the thing meant about how the family was holding Sammy back? They’d brought him forward for crying out loud. They’d taught him to shoot, they’d taught him to fight. All he’d wanted to do was to sit and read and brood all the time. Exactly what natural talents had the pukwudgie thought Dean was smothering in Sam? 

And where had the stupid pictures come from? Did pukwudgies carry cameras or was this one just special? Had Sam given it the pictures? The second picture had definitely been taken with the sitter’s knowledge. The monster had said he’d spoken with Sam, that he’d sought the kid out because of Dean’s scent. It was like he had… respect for Sammy or something. But monsters didn’t respect hunters, everyone knew that.

He cleared up the last of his stuff. He emailed Taurus to let him know that the cure had worked. The guy had been a real help and everything, a good friend. Besides, he’d said Sammy was worried. He couldn’t actually get a message to Sammy, couldn’t let it look like he was letting discipline slip or like he was being disloyal to his father, but there was no way Taurus wasn’t going to pass on a little news like that. Just a little bit of news like that wouldn’t be playing sides, would it? He sent an email to Brandi letting her know that he needed to clear town for a family emergency. He’d liked her, but he’d known it couldn’t last. He shouldn’t have let it last as long as it had, honestly. He’d gotten to be a little too close to her, a little too close to monogamous. At least she’d never actually asked him for that, expected that of him. 

Just like that, and with the key and an envelope and a note in the building manager’s mailbox he was on his way. By the time the sun rose he’d made it to New York State. Just Dean and his Baby. 

He’d probably make it to New Mexico by Halloween, which meant he’d be with Dad for November 2. He didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. On the one hand he’d be able to keep him out of the worst of the trouble. On the other, he’d have to witness it. John Winchester’s breakdown wasn’t lessened by the presence of his son. Maybe Sammy’s absence would make it easier on him. Dean doubted it, but anything could happen. He sped up. Whatever the outcome, his father needed him. He wasn’t going to fail him.

**Author's Note:**

> Supernatural and the characters from the show are not my property. I make no money from this or any other work of fan fiction.
> 
> Freetown is real. You can look it up online. The reference I'm using for a lot of this work will be "Ghosts of the Bridgewater Triangle" by Christopher Balzano, published by Schiffer Publishing in 2008. I've actually been to the woods. I had no paranormal encounters and the park staff were super nice and considerate - and very surprised by the speed that two larger-than-average women with a stroller could achieve on the trails. 
> 
> I'll try to point out things in the text that actually have some basis in local legend, just because I like local myth and history. On the whole if you see something mentioned in the Bridgewater Triangle in this text, particularly in Freetown, I probably got at least the inspiration from somewhere. Feel free to look it up. For example - the Old Shade Factory in Rehoboth is totally a thing. Whether or not it is actually haunted depends on your beliefs, but stories have been told about it since the first fire there. 
> 
> And we really do wallow in our creepy in New England. It's just who we are.


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